Best practices for producing a live event in Microsoft Teams

Planning and producing your event

• Most importantly, practice. Run several events as rehearsals, watch the attendee experience live and on demand. Learn the system well, so producers don’t have to solve problems during the live event.

• Always have more than one person in the event group. Ideally you'll have three people, with one person outside the presentation room. That way, if there’s a network outage in the room, you don’t lose control of the meeting.

• Avoid sharing an ICS link from your calendar, and instead create a custom link (using bit.ly, for example) as a join link for attendees. In case of any catastrophic event, or if a producer makes a mistake, you can easily create a new broadcast event and update your custom URL to point to it.

• Have the event group join about 30 minutes ahead of time. Share a slide with a nice intro, indicating that the event will begin soon. Then, start the live broadcast about 10 minutes early to make sure everything is working. Leave all audio muted until you’re ready to go live with your presenter at the start of the live event.

• Plan for your event group communication—real-time communications are critical for live events. The event chat (available for the organizer, producers, and presenters) is a good way to stay in touch.

• Assign roles and responsibilities—know who is responsible for each step of the operation, from camera operators, presenters, and Q&A moderators, to your overall producer or director.

Audio

• Don't ignore audio—it’s the most important part of a great event. Some people may just listen with the browser in the background.

• Have a good microphone for presenters. Some people don’t handle microphones well under pressure, so wearable microphones can be helpful for inexperienced presenters. Or, if you're presenting from a computer or other device, use a Teams-certified headset. 

• Test in-room audio before the event so you don't bring noise or feedback from the room into the online event.

• Add audio to the live event using any audio capture device that will take balanced audio (XLR connector) or even a headphone style 1/8-inch plug and let you plug into the computer running Teams via USB.

• Alternatively, you can use a high-end AV system, and connect the HDMI or SDI output of that system into Teams using a basic video capture device like an HDMI-USB box.

Video

• Light your subject well—you can’t have too much light for most cameras. Lighting can be the difference between a production being perceived as high-quality or amateur.

• Use three lights to illuminate your subject—a key light, a fill light, and a back light to provide good depth.

  

• You can use a capture device to take HDMI inputs into your meeting as a camera. For example, you can use them to connect a prosumer camera with better optics and zoom capabilities and an HDMI output as a Teams meeting camera.

• These HDMI capture devices can also be used to stream a desktop into a live event to show videos or demos. Any PC or Mac with an HDMI output can be used.

Screen sharing

If you are the sole event producer, we recommended you use two monitors. This way, you can share the content from the second monitor while producing the event from first monitor.

Teams live events use video-based screen sharing (VBSS). Use the following planning guidelines to ensure you get the best experience:

• Contact your IT admin to make sure producers and presenters are assigned the right TeamsMeetingPolicy with the correct settings for IPVideo and ScreenSharing. If ScreenSharingMode or IPVIdeo are set to None, producers and presenters won't be able to share their screens.

• Ensure network bandwidth requirements account for media traffic:

Need assistance with your events?

With the Microsoft 365 Live Event Assistance Program (LEAP), we can help you get more familiar with setting up and running an event, webinar, or large meeting and be available during the event to help if any questions or issues come up.

During preview, the assistance program is free to customers using Teams, Stream, or Yammer to deliver their events. Sign up now to get started.

Want to know more?

Microsoft Teams live events overview

Produce a live event in Teams

Produce an external encoder live event in Teams

Present in a live event in Teams