Broadcasts in Engage events

When to use an Engage broadcast 

Broadcast events are best for one‑to‑many communications where a presenter or leadership team shares information with a broad audience at scale. Broadcasts are designed for structured delivery, clarity, and reach, with controlled interaction rather than open collaboration.

Common use cases include: 

• Company or organizational town halls: Leadership updates, strategy announcements, and executive communications with delivery to large audiences;

• All‑hands and milestone announcements: Business updates, transformations, or major launches that require consistent messaging;

• Highly produced events: Sessions that benefit from moderated interaction, staging, and a polished experience.

Broadcast events favor scale, reliability, and message consistency over live collaboration. For events that need open discussion, shared participation, or some‑to‑many interactions, consider using Engage meetings instead. 

How Engage broadcasts work 

An Engage town hall combines three layers: Teams town hall, an Engage event page/feed, and pre-defined policies.

Each broadcast event supports a landing page with a pinned conversation and a Details card, and a Join Broadcast button that is active before the event starts.

Engage broadcasts support use in the following venues: 

• Communities: Ideal for organization‑wide, functional, or interest‑based town halls.

• Storylines: Suited for leader‑led broadcasts with broad visibility and reach.

When you decide to produce a broadcast, you choose whether to produce directly through Microsoft Teams or to use an external device to deliver the production:

Produce through Teams: To produce a new event in Teams, select Join broadcast in the right panel, which opens the Teams client. Most users produce events with this option. 

RTMP-in: You can also use external video tools to produce live events (RTMP-in enabled). Doing so, you produce your event with a studio setup or video production hardware, and then stream it to Teams with Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). We recommend RTMP if you want to mix multiple video and audio feeds, use pre-recorded content, and to deliver a polished, broadcast-quality experience. To produce the event using an external app or device, use the RTMP information in the meeting options in the right panel of the event page. Copy this information to your encoder. 

Using Engage broadcasts and the event feed 

Engage broadcasts include a rich, durable event feed that works seamlessly across Engage and Teams. 

The event feed appears as a Q&A within Teams, with posts, comments, and reactions fully synchronized between Engage and Teams. This ensures a single, shared conversation, no matter where participants join. 

Attendees can interact before, during, and after the broadcast, in the Engage event page and in Teams. The live session preserves all discussion, to create a lasting record of questions, answers, and leadership responses. 

Learn more 

Attend an Engage event

Async Engage events

Engage events overview

Meetings in Engage events

Organize an Engage event

Analytics dashboard for Engage events

Teams town hall analytics - Dive into the details of Teams town hall broadcasting analytics, which you can access from Viva Engage's Event analytics page.

Plan for Teams town halls - Includes creation permissions, presenter roles, attendee experience, external access, recording, and moderation 

Get started with town hall in Microsoft Teams - Official Microsoft support guide that explains what Teams town halls are, when to use them, and how to schedule, host, and manage large‑scale events in Microsoft Teams.