Microsoft Teams Twitches Its Way Towards Live Event Streaming
You can now run events in Microsoft Teams with up to 10,000 attendees. This feature reflects Microsoft’s commitment to the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business merger. This “Live Event” capability was released to General Availability on March 26, 2019 with the following features:
- Up to 10,000 people can join the same meeting
- Moderated question and answer functionality
- AI-powered captions and translations
- Built-in analytics capabilities
- Optimized network bandwidth via enterprise content delivery networks (eCDN) offered by Hive Streaming, Kollective, and Ramp OmniCache
Our Take
This feature reflects Microsoft’s commitment to the merger of Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams. The web conferencing space is not going to wait for Microsoft Teams, so Microsoft Teams will need to not only have the basics, but also a compelling portfolio of innovative features.
Microsoft currently does not have this compelling portfolio even within the Team Collaboration space. According to our SoftwareReviews January 2019 category report, it scores average across the board, and 14/20 overall. It scores significantly lower than Slack – the category leader – and Cisco Webex Teams – the counterpart to Cisco Webex Meetings, the category leader in the web conferencing space.
Source: SoftwareReviews, January 2019.
For those that already have Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business, you can start to take advantage of the Live Event functionality. Invest extra effort into learning and development on Microsoft Teams and your infrastructure components so you can better troubleshoot the issues that will inevitably arise.