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Live events in Microsoft Teams overview

  • Article
  • Applies to:
    Microsoft Teams

Note

Teams live events will be deprecated on September 30, 2024. We recommend that you use town halls instead. For details, see Plan for Teams town halls.

You can create live events using Microsoft Teams across your organization. You can schedule, produce, and deliver live events for various scenarios such as company-wide events, leadership updates, and more. Live streaming events enable producers to curate and control the content that is broadcast to an audience.

You can create, schedule, and run live events using a single bitrate RTMP or RTMPS stream from an encoder – we take care of all the transcoding for adaptive bitrate delivery to your viewers.

Just like any other video in Teams, you can make the live event open to your entire company or limit the access to specific groups. Managing the event access type provides an end-to-end creation and viewing experience inside of Teams.

After the event, the video will be available on demand with intelligent features including:

  • Speech-to-text and closed captions.
  • Transcript search and timecodes let you quickly find moments that matter in a video.

Live events in Microsoft 365

You can create live events in Teams or Viva Engage, wherever your audience, team, or community resides. Attendees can watch the event in high-definition (HD) video and submit questions through a moderated Q&A experience. Seamless integration across Microsoft 365 means that you can use Teams to deliver highly produced, studio-quality events.

Get started

Ensure that users you want to be able to create live events have the granted permissions required to create a live event. By default, everyone in your organization can create a live event, however a Teams admin can restrict access. Learn more about live event administration.

  1. In the left navigation of the Teams admin center, go to Meetings > Live events policies > the Manage Policies tab.
  2. If you want to:
    1. edit the existing default policy, choose Global (Org-wide default).
    2. create a new custom policy, choose +Add.
    3. edit a custom policy, select the policy, and then choose Edit.

Monitor your event

As a producer you can use the Teams client to see the audience feed (visible on the right side) and the number of attendees currently viewing the event.

Capabilities

The following are capabilities of live streaming events:

Operation Limits
Create live events in Teams (with external encoder) Enterprise (E1, E3, E5), Education (A3, A5)
Watch live event Viewers with permissions to view the event and a valid Teams license (unless the event is public, then a license to view isn't required)
Maximum resolution 720p
Maximum concurrent live events (in prelive or live) 151
Active concurrent viewers 100001
Maximum length of live event 4 hours 1
Partner network caching support Hive, Kollective, Riverbed, Ramp, Microsoft
Other network caching support Might work, but isn't supported
Attendee DVR controls Pause, playback speed (2x catch up, 1x at live), seek
Real-time captions 708 caption pass-through from encoder
Automatic speech-to-text and captions Processed after the event
Interactive discussions Supported via Viva Engage when the event is created from Viva Engage
Teams comments Available after the event ends
On-demand viewing on live event (after event) Automatic transition for live to on-demand for immediate viewing and indexing in Teams
Downloadable recording Processed and available after the live event by owners

1 The limits that are set might be changed. Check Limits and specifications for Teams.

Teams live events is a highly available service and you can expect good performance at scale. In the unlikely scenario that results in failover being required, live events using external encoding don't have redundancy and aren't recoverable.