Live Events

Featured Karl Kocar

Viva Engage and Live Events

Viva Engage is a great way for leaders to keep in touch with their employees and for communities to come together to share news and knowledge. One important way to ensure staff are kept informed is to have regular virtual/hybrid Town Hall meetings. Live Events can be easily accessed from the Engage App to ensure all staff have the opportunity to either watch live or catch up on the recording.

The video the shows how M365 licensed users can access Live Event meetings from their Viva Engage mobile experience. In the demonstration, my user is licenced with a Front Line Worker SKU.

Note: Since I created the video, Microsoft has announced that Yammer will be rebranded to Viva Engage.

#MSEmployee #MSPartnerUK

Video Featured Karl Kocar

Network Device Interface and Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams has recently added support for Network Device Interface (NDI), which is a LAN based IP Video broadcast technology. You can learn more about the mechanics of NDI here.

The first use cases I’ve started to see for NDI in Teams revolve around providing and consuming content to/from third party encoders to assist with the production of Live Events. For example, a Live Event producer can pull individual video streams out of a Teams meeting and add them as discrete sources within an encoder (such as OBS), then stream these into a Live Event broadcast.

This is really useful as it provides an easy way to insert additional video production content into a Town Hall or Broadcast event.

NDI support in the Microsoft Teams client is controlled via an admin policy. Refer to the Microsoft Docs if you want to learn more.

If you want to run through an introduction on producing Live Events with an external encoder, check out my previous post: Teams Live Events External Production.

Video Featured Karl Kocar

Top Tip – Teams Live Events External Production

If you know about virtual meeting tools then you have probably come across or used Live Events, which is the meeting broadcast solution that’s part of Microsoft Teams. It’s not entirely unexpected but I’ve seen a rapid rise in the use of Live Events over the last 6 months and I am actively working with Microsoft Partners to increase market capacity for this type of meeting in the UK.

When reading up on Live Events you may have come across external encoding? This is the ability to use 3rd party equipment to deliver studio quality production via the Teams Live Events client. I felt the documentation was a bit dry so I created the following demonstration video to provide a quick intro into this topic in under 4 minutes.

Hint – the encoder password shown in the video is a dummy one

As you can see it’s actually not too hard to get started with the technology. However, I believe they key to delivering a professional looking event is actually creativity, preparation and practice, regardless of the encoding/production method you are using.

Just to finish off, here are a few tips and tricks that might be useful: