Notes: 

  • Your communication needs are changing. We’re ready to help. To continue meeting the needs of customers, we will extend the temporary default limits for Microsoft 365 live events through December 31, 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.

  • We require at least five (5) days’ notice to set up a custom live event.

About 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:

  • 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 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: M365 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.

  1. Go to Admin settings > Live events.

  2. 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 [1, see below]

Enterprise (E1, E3, E5), Education (A3, A5)

Create live events in Microsoft Stream in Microsoft 365 [1, see below] (Teams and/or Yammer with external encoder) [2, see 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

Active concurrent viewers

10,000

Maximum length of live event

4 hours

>Partner network caching support

Hive, Kollective, Ramp

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 contents

Available after event

On-demand viewing on live event (after event) [4, see 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

Create a live event

Live events in Microsoft 365

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