Transcription
In the last section, Mark explained the Teams premium customization options. In this part, Mark is going to help us understand the Teams premium webinars and town halls. He will take us through the admin portal walkthrough on how to configure the policies and configurations required for webinars and town halls. I hope you are really going to enjoy this section. Let's go and find out how.
So, we're going to switch gears now and talk a little bit about running events inside of Microsoft Teams and some of the capabilities and additional features that you get with Teams premium. When we're talking about meetings specifically, there are a couple of different types included in your base licensing for Microsoft Teams. You've got meetings, webinars, town halls, and for a little bit longer, you'll have Teams Live Events there as well.
Just bringing up this documentation to showcase some of the things that we've got from a meetings, webinar, and town hall perspective gives you an indication of where Teams premium changes and enhances some of the capabilities. You'll see here we've talked a lot about meetings, and we've discussed meeting templates and protection—things like watermarks and custom themes—all of those we've spoken through already.
When we're talking about webinars and town halls, premium introduces a couple of things. For town halls specifically, we increased the capacity of town halls from the default 10,000 participants to a premium town hall, which allows a scale of up to 20,000 participants. We can break that down even further from a feature comparison perspective. So, we've got capacity changes if you're licensed with Teams premium, and we've also got some capability changes when you're licensed with Teams premium.
For example, using this table, we can see some of the features; for example, custom backgrounds are a premium capability. End-to-end encryption, which we've spoken about briefly as premium, is again specifically for meetings. But when we're talking about webinars and town hall calls, we've got the ability to really curate what attendees are seeing inside of a Teams webinar.
This is managing what people are seeing during the event. This is a real-time live event that's occurring. You've got the ability here, and this is a bit of an indication of how this works. On the left-hand side, you've got all of the people that are in this meeting or in this webinar, but then on the right-hand side, you can see encompassed by the red box what attendees are actually seeing. As a moderator or organizer of an event, you've got the ability to pick and choose what's presented on screen at any particular point in time. If there was content that you wanted to be seen alongside a video or you wanted multiple video streams, you've got the ability to do that quite easily. You can simply select a feed and send it live.
That's a really important feature if you're looking to produce curated experiences for attendees. We've also got some capabilities for RTMP in. RTMP is Real-Time Messaging Protocol; it's the ability to have custom or professional-style video equipment providing a video stream into the meeting. If your equipment is able to broadcast a URL, inside of Teams, we can ingest that as a stream and then present that in the webinar. So, you're not just limited to using your Teams client; you've got the ability to ingest a real-time stream as well.
When we look at the different types of events inside of Teams, and we spoke about licensing earlier on, when we're running a webinar or town hall and we require the premium capability, we only require the meeting organizer to be licensed with that feature for all attendees to benefit.
So, we look at the creation of a specific webinar or an event. In order to do that, we can just come in here and pick the type of event that we want. I can pick a webinar, and then I can go through the experience of creating all of the various different types of information that's required to run a webinar. We've got things like presenter bios, we can set custom themes, we can enable registration, and we can also have reminder emails go out on a specified basis.
Here is a bit of a template of what is sent in that email, and again, there are a bunch of different options for configuring emails to go out either pre-event or post-event to share recordings, for example.
Now, when we're talking about webinars, often the next topic of conversation is how do I make my events more efficient? When we're talking about webinars, we're often asked how to ensure that the experience for users is as good as possible. Of course, we've got some recommendations and documentation around how the people who are presenting inside of a webinar, town hall, or live event are turning up, making sure they've got appropriate bandwidth, their cameras are high quality, and those types of recommendations.
But what if we have users inside of an organization? Perhaps you've got a thousand people inside of one organization all consuming the stream of that event simultaneously. When we have an event, we typically consume somewhere from 1 to 1.5 megabits per second of bandwidth per stream. If we've got 100 people in that event or a thousand people in that event, we start to really ramp up the bandwidth requirements.
That's where Microsoft ECDN comes into play. Microsoft ECDN, as I said, can be purchased as a standalone license type, but it's also included in Microsoft Teams premium. When we're looking at ECDN at a very high level, before you have ECDN installed and configured, each one of these little hexagons here is consuming an individual video stream. Each one of them is using 1 to 1.5 megabits per second of bandwidth through the firewall just to consume that stream.
When we implement ECDN, we've got the ability for the Teams client to act as a bit of a buddy for other Teams clients. Once it's in, you can see here that this client is consuming the video stream through the corporate firewall onto the corporate network and then distributing that stream among clients internally. The bandwidth requirements for an organization are significantly reduced.
We've got organizations that we work with regularly that have somewhere even upwards of 20,000 users on their corporate network trying to consume an event. Without ECDN, it really is a losing battle unless you've got significant bandwidth available to you through your internet gateway.
So, once you enable it, is it like peer-to-peer networking, like peer-to-peer connectivity, cache sharing, or whatever? It is absolutely. We've had ECDN for a long time through partners of ours delivering that capability, but what we've done through one of those partners is now a first-party offering included natively in the Teams client. It is exactly that—it's peer-to-peer video sharing to help reduce the bandwidth requirement on the internet gateway.
As you can see here, these are all sharing video feeds peer-to-peer. You can imagine, you might have 100 people on a particular floor in one of your buildings; you might want to have those peer together. You get a lot of control from a configuration perspective on those policies to control which clients peer with which clients. You don't want to have people who are in the office peering with those who are on a VPN subnet, for example.
As I said, you get a raft of control on implementing that. When we're talking about events in Microsoft Teams, specifically at the moment, Teams Town Hall, Teams Live Event, and those events hosted in Fever Engage are all supported by ECDN to help optimize those events.