Teams Live Events is a feature within Microsoft Teams that enables Oxford University staff to schedule, produce and broadcast meetings to a large online audience up to 20,000 [updated July 2023]. It is especially useful if you are presenting to an audience outside the University as attendees can watch via a URL link and don’t have to log in.
Teams Live Events is designed to be used for large-scale information dissemination such as town hall meetings, departmental updates, broadcasting keynotes or online training at scale. It is an extension of Teams Meetings and uses all the familiar tools and layout of a normal Teams meeting but with the ability to control the presentation of the meeting more.
Teams Live Events has an additional role of ‘Producer’ which is mainly focussed on the technical aspects of running the live event; managing the start and end of the session, presenters and the presentation screens. Permissions for the live event can be public (allowing external attendees), organisation (the University), or select groups of people of your choice. The attendee experience is more passive in a Teams Live Event – they can only view one presentation screen, have video and microphones disabled and can only participate in discussions through a moderated Q&A area. If required, events can be recorded and stored in Streams, allowing attendees to view on-demand.
For most meetings or briefings with fewer than 350 attendees, a regular Teams meeting provides all the functionality you would need. The number of concurrent Oxford live events that can take place within Teams Live Events is limited so it is important to only use it for appropriate large-scale events.
The Educational Media team will be holding some introductory webinars aimed at those colleagues running large-scale events and these will be advertised shortly. More information is available on our Nexus365 Teams Live Events help pages and specific enquiries from event organisers should be directed to media@it.ox.ac.uk.
What’s the difference between Teams Meetings and Teams Live Events?
| |
Teams Meetings |
Teams Live Events |
| Max no. of participants |
300* [amended 22 June 2020] |
Up to 20,000 [updated July 2023] |
| Best for |
Any online meeting, presentation, teacher-led session with up to 300* attendees |
Large-scale broadcast or large staff briefing with more than 300* attendees |
| Who can attend? |
Organisation-only, select group only, external guests can join via a link |
Public or organisation-only or select group only
Attendees can choose to join anonymously
(Note: you cannot stream to social media channels such as Facebook or YouTube)
|
| Roles? |
Presenter
Attendee |
Producer
Presenter
Attendee
|
| Recording possible? |
For teaching purposes only, access via a request form |
Recording has to be enabled in order for recording to work, access via a request form |
| Controls during meetings |
All roles can speak, share video and chat
Attendees can un-mute
Chat is open to all attendees (unless attendees @ a specific person)
Not all meetings are recorded so limited on-demand viewing |
More control - only Producer and Presenter roles can be seen, speak, present information and use ‘chat’ with each other
Attendees can use Q&A function. Presenters and Producer can choose which Q&A to publish
Attendees can pause and rewind the live video and watch on-demand (if recording is enabled)
|
| Screens visible |
Currently up to nine participants can be seen |
Attendees see one screen at a time – Presenters and Producers control this
Panel discussions show one speaker at a time and conversations between more speakers are audio only |
| Time limit? |
None |
Up to 16 hours [updated July 2023] |
| Other licence limits |
N/A |
50 concurrent events [updated July 2023] |
| Security |
Acceptable risk level as determined by Third Party Security Assessment and Data Privacy Impact Assessment |
See Teams Meeting column. Be aware that anyone with a link to the event can join so, as ever, avoid sensitive or confidential information in large or public events
|
| More information |
Nexus365 Teams help pages |
Nexus365 Teams Live Events help page and more will be added to Educational Media help pages |
