Broadcast your live event
Note: Your communication needs are changing. We’re ready to help. In April, we announced that temporary default limit increases would be enabled for Microsoft 365 live events to help better support customers, through July 1st. To continue meeting the needs of customers, we will extend the temporary default limits until June 30, 2021. Live events hosted in Teams, Stream, and Yammer will continue to temporarily support events for up to 20,000 attendees, 16 hours in length, and 50 events happening simultaneously. Additionally, customers can host a live event in Stream for up to 100,000 attendees when planned though the Microsoft live events assistance program.
Note: We require at least five (5) days’ notice to set up a custom live event.
Overview of live events
You can create live events using Microsoft Stream across the organization. You can schedule, produce, and deliver live events for a variety of scenarios such as companywide events, leadership updates and more. Live events enable producers to curate and control the content that is broadcast to an audience.
Note: Do you have a question about or need help with live events? Contact our Live Events Assistance team to get started!
You can create, schedule, and run live events using a single bitrate RTMP or RTMPS stream from an encoder – we’ll take care of all the transcoding for adaptive bitrate delivery to your viewers.
Just like any other video in Stream, 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 Stream.
After the event, the video will be available on demand with intelligent features including:
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Speech-to-text and closed captions
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Transcript search and timecodes let you quickly find moments that matter in a video.
Live events in Microsoft 365
You can create a live event in Stream, Microsoft Teams or Yammer — wherever your audience, team, or community resides. Attendees can participate in real time, with high-definition (HD) video and interactive discussion or catch up later with powerful AI features that unlock the content of the event recording. Seamless integration across Microsoft 365 means that you can use Stream to deliver highly produced, studio-quality events. Learn more about live events in Microsoft 365.
Ignite 2019 session: Microsoft 365 live events - How to produce an event, architecture, admin, which tool when
If you missed our "M365 live events across Teams, Yammer, & Stream" session at Ignite in November 2019, you can watch the recording of the session below or go to the Microsoft Tech Community to download resources for the session.
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 Stream admin can restrict access. Learn more about live event administration.
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Go to Admin settings > Live events
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Click Create > Live event. Follow the instructions in Create a live event in Stream
Monitor your event
As an organizer or producer, you can monitor the audience engagement in real-time. Quickly toggle between audience and producer views to see different screens and monitor analytics like current viewers, likes and total views for your event.
Capabilities
The following are capabilities of live events:
Operation
Limits
Create live events in Microsoft Stream
Enterprise (E1, E3, E5), Education (A3, A5)
Create live events in Microsoft 365 [see 1, below] (Teams and/or Yammer with external encoder) [see 2, below]
Enterprise (E1, E3, E5), Education (A3, A5)
Watch live event
Viewers with permissions on the event and a valid Microsoft Stream license
Maximum resolution
720p
Maximum concurrent live events (in pre-live or live)
15 [see 3, below]
Active concurrent viewers
10,000 [see 3, below]
Maximum length of live event
4 hours
Maximum length of live event
4 hours
Partner network caching support
Hive, Kollective, Ramps
Other network caching support
May work but not 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 event
Interactive discussions
Supported via Yammer when event is created from Yammer
Microsoft Stream comments
Available after event
On-demand viewing on live event (after event) [see 4, below]
Automatic transition for live to on-demand for immediate viewing and indexing in Microsoft Stream
Downloadable recording
Processed and available after live event by owners
1—The Stream admin can restrict permissions to create live events.
2—You must be a group owner to create a live event in Yammer.
3—Number of live events and attendee counts are subject to change and dependent on service availability.
4—Live events are subject to storage usage in Microsoft Stream. The size of the post-live encoded top bitrate, used also as the downloadable recording, is used towards storage quota. Licensing overview.
Live events in Microsoft 365 is a highly-available service and you can expect good performance at scale. In the very unlikely scenario that results in failover being required, live events using external encoding will not have redundancy and are not be recoverable.
See also
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