Switch from Microsoft Teams live events to town halls
Important: The Teams live event experience is retiring. Please switch to Teams town halls for the newest event features and experience. For more information, please read this blog post.
Whether you’re organizing a company-wide review, or meeting with clients, town halls are optimized for delivering high-quality, produced events to large and small audiences.
Town hall vs. live events
Town halls have many of the same capabilities as live events, as well as new advanced features, that can help you organize high-quality, large-scale events.
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Live events |
Town halls (fully interactive) |
Town halls (view-only) |
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|---|---|---|---|
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Capacity |
10k |
3k |
10k |
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Concurrent events |
15 |
50 |
50 |
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Duration |
4 hours |
30 hours |
30 hours |
|
Attendee reporting |
 |
|
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RTMP-in |
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|
|
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Q&A |
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|
|
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On-demand recording |
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|
|
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Green room |
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|
|
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To host larger, fully interactive town halls, attendee capacity packs are required. To learn more, contact your IT admin.
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To host town halls with larger capacity (20,000-100,000 attendees), contact LEAP at least two weeks before the event to request permission for your org.
Attendee experience
Just like in live events, town hall attendees can watch presenters and participate in Q&A. To minimize distractions and keep focus on the event, attendees won’t be able to turn on their mics or cameras, or chat with other attendees.
Email communications
Town hall attendees automatically receive email invites when an organizer creates the event and emails with a link to the event recording if it’s published.
In events of up to 3,000 attendees, organizers can edit town hall emails with customized details. For use of this feature in larger events, your org must have attendee capacity packs to enable instances up to 100,000.
If you had Teams Premium prior to April 1, 2026, you'll continue to have access to this feature in events up to 100,000 attendees until the expiration of your license. To learn more about Teams licensing for events, please contact your IT admin.
To learn more, see Schedule a town hall in Microsoft Teams.
Live translated captions
Live translated captions allow users to see captions translated into the language they’re most comfortable with.
In live events, attendees can choose to see live translated captions in one of six different languages that are pre-selected by the event organizer.
In town halls, attendees can choose to see live translated captions in one of the languages preselected by the organizer. Attendees will be able to choose from six different languages, or ten if the organizer has Teams Premium.
Event roles
In live events, there are organizer, producer, presenter, and attendee roles. In town halls, there are organizer, co-organizer, presenter, and attendee roles.
The producer role in live events will be replaced by the organizer, co-organizer, and presenter roles in town hall because these roles will have similar functionality to the producer role. They’ll be able to start and stop the event, share content and external video, and choose which presenters and content are featured on screen. To learn more, see Manage what attendees see.