Live streaming events in 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's 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. This 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 a live steaming event 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.
- In the left navigation of the Teams admin center, go to Meetings > Live events policies > the Manage Policies tab.
- If you want to:
- edit the existing default policy, choose Global (Org-wide default).
- create a new custom policy, choose +Add.
- 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 is not required) |
| Maximum resolution | 720p |
| Maximum concurrent live events (in pre-live or live) | 15 |
| Active concurrent viewers | 10000 |
| Maximum length of live event | 4 hours |
| Partner network caching support | Hive, Kollective, Riverbed, Ramp, Microsoft |
| Other network caching support | May 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 |
Live events in Teams 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 won't have redundancy and aren't recoverable.
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