With a mission to “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” Microsoft is constantly updating their products and adding new features to make this empowerment a reality. And while these updates benefit the end user, it often causes a bit of confusion about what it means, who it is available to, when, how and more. After a few conversations with the Microsoft Teams and Stream product teams, we took a crack at answering the questions our customers might have when it comes to the Microsoft Teams Video Streaming updates.

What we know today

Microsoft Teams Live Events – Still the Gold Standard

Today, if our customers and prospects are looking to run a live event, or even a large one-to-many video-based meeting, a Teams Live Event is the best choice. Whether they are running it with a webcam and PowerPoint, or using an external encoder, this provides them with both the tools and the enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) integration to successfully deliver and scale their event. All workflows will remain the same, ensuring you still can take advantage of the delivery mechanism you know and trust.

Microsoft Teams Meetings with Overflow

Microsoft Teams has expanded its view-only meeting experience to 20,000 people. That means organizations with Office 365 E3/A3 and E5/A5 plans can host up to 300 interactive meeting attendees before the experience becomes view-only for new joiners. Interactive attendees enjoy all the same functionalities of a normal Teams Meeting, while overflow attendees can comment in chat, but do not have voice capabilities. At current, Teams Meetings with Overflow does not support ECDN capabilities, so Kollective’s recommendation here is that if scaling within your network or bandwidth is a concern, a Teams Live Event is still the right option for video events of this size. The good news is that Kollective will scale Teams Meetings with Overflow with the upcoming release of the Microsoft OnePlayer (see below).

Upcoming Changes

The Microsoft OnePlayer

Microsoft will be replacing Azure Media Player (AMP) with the new OnePlayer in the Teams and Stream client and web apps. OnePlayer’s advanced technology will further improve video playback and enable smarter integrations with ECDN applications. Anywhere you see video will take advantage of this new architecture and can be loaded the Kollective software development kit (SDK). When this is released, Teams Meetings with Overflow will be delivered for all attendees over the overflow threshold. In addition, the new player will load Kollective inside of the Teams Mobile App, giving as a larger footprint and allowing additional scale for our customers.

Microsoft Webinar

When it is released, Webinar will offer organizations another option to stream live video to view-only attendees. Like Teams Meetings with Overflow, these users can ask questions in chat but do not have voice or screenshare capabilities. Another Microsoft product leveraging OnePlayer, ECDN partners will deliver video to attendees at scale.

Microsoft Stream 2.0

Microsoft is breaking down the Stream silo and integrating it into the OneDrive/SharePoint ecosystem. Once rolled out, users can embed, manage and send a Stream video the same way you would any other file using the same M365 permissions. Although Stream will remain its own product with dedicated video interface, all recorded meetings will be stored in OneDrive and can be accessed by all participants. ECDN functionality stays the same.