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With a fresh set of new features, Microsoft Teams Town Hall gets the glow-up experience for both your presenters and audience.
In this video, town hall pro Shaun explores:
Choosing the right Microsoft Teams event template can be tricky. With options like Regular Meetings, Managed Meetings, Webinars, Town Halls, and Virtual Appointments, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. That’s why we created a video guide breaking down each template so you can pick the perfect one for your next event. Plus, Shaun breaks down all the pros and cons so you can make an informed decision!
Perfect for smaller, interactive sessions with fewer than 500 attendees (although Teams supports up to 999). Regular meetings are quick to set up, familiar to most users, and include helpful features like PowerPoint Live. Attendees can go on camera and use their microphones, which makes it ideal for collaboration.
Best for: Team check-ins, workshops, and casual interactive sessions.
Think of this as a regular meeting with added controls. Organizers can decide who presents, turn chat on or off, enable Q&A, and manage what attendees see through advanced spotlighting. This format helps keep the focus where it needs to be.
Best for: Smaller audiences where focus on the presenter is important, and a casual but structured atmosphere is preferred.
Webinars build on the features of managed meetings but introduce one big advantage: registration. Organizers can design customized registration pages with presenter bios, gather audience data such as job titles or industries, and send reminders before the event. This provides valuable insights and creates a more polished first impression.
Best for: When pre-event registration, audience data collection, and polished invitations are important.
For large-scale events, Town Hall is the go-to choice. It supports up to 20,000 attendees, with powerful tools for controlling what the audience sees. Attendees cannot use their camera or microphone, but chat and Q&A can be enabled. Presenters get a separate join link and dedicated chat for coordination.5. Virtual Appointment
Best for: Large company-wide events, executive briefings, and all-hands meetings.
Although not really an “event” template, Virtual Appointment is designed for important one-on-one or small group meetings with external participants. It creates a professional, tailored invitation, and external guests can join easily from a browser without needing Teams installed.
Best for: Client meetings, consultations, and interviews with people outside your organization.
💡 Pro Tip: Even if your event is casual, a little planning goes a long way. Assign someone to manage spotlighting and mute controls as it keeps your event professional and smooth.
Why pay for expensive registration tools when Microsoft Teams already has what you need? No extra tools. No hidden costs. Just a seamless way to capture and engage your audience — from first click to post-event follow-up.
For event organizers, registration is often the first touchpoint in your attendee’s journey — and one of the most important. An effective registration system doesn’t just gather names; it captures valuable attendee data, builds anticipation, and ensures a seamless path from sign-up to show-up.
Microsoft Teams Webinars easily configures a professional virtual event with built-in registration and attendee management — without needing to engage with a third-party registration platform – which can easily be the costliest line item of your virtual event. If your event will serve 1,000 participants and attendees or less, Microsoft Teams Webinars is a viable option.
With Microsoft Teams, you can create a fully branded registration page directly from the Teams or Outlook calendar interface.
Once someone registers, Teams handles the email follow-up for you. Attendees automatically receive:
Microsoft Teams gives organizers a real-time view of registrations from the calendar event itself. You can:
Microsoft Teams lets you control who can register and how open the event is:
This flexibility is especially useful in B2B settings where you may want to pre-approve registrants, restrict access to certain clients or regions, or host internal training sessions.
Microsoft Teams Webinar data doesn’t have to live in a silo. You can:
After the webinar, you’ll get detailed attendance reports, including:
You can use this data to prioritize follow-ups or plan your next event strategy.
B2B events often involve sensitive discussions — especially in industries like finance, healthcare, or government.
With Microsoft Teams:
In addition to a robust registration tool, Microsoft Teams Premium unlocks professional external production capabilities (RTMP-in) that can elevate your webinar to a multi-camera broadcast experience with high-end motion graphics, titles and multiple inputs. Professional external production is ideal for virtual or hybrid events like company-wide town halls and other large-scale productions.
To learn more about RTMP and Microsoft Teams, watch our 3-minute how-to video and see how you can transform workaday all-employee meetings into high-quality broadcast events.
If you’re looking to simplify your B2B webinar process without sacrificing professionalism or data integrity, Microsoft Teams Webinar is a smart choice. Its built-in registration features, automated workflows, and native integration with Microsoft 365 make it one of the most efficient tools for running online events.
Managing a virtual or hybrid event is an enormous undertaking – especially when you consider all the moving parts from registration, content, messaging, run of show, participants (leaders, special guests and stakeholders) on top of oversight of the live event presenters and attendees. Worktank, a tightly connected team of technologists, creatives and project managers, leads hundreds of virtual and hybrid events every year and we’re here to help you take your meeting and broadcast to the next level. Get in touch!
In episodes 1-7, we covered everything you need to get started with Town Hall in Microsoft Teams. In this final episode of the series, we’ll show you how the RTMP feature can transform your meeting into a high-quality, multidimensional TV-style broadcast.
In this episode, we cover:
00:00 – Intro
00:40 – What is RTMP?
01:15 – Turning on RTMP
01:36 – Deliver a TV-show quality broadcast via simplicity and securing of Microsoft Teams
01:59 – Using RTMP for your next meeting
02:19 – Handling complex broadcasts – and how Worktank can help
03:09 – Tell us what you want to learn!
If you love this episode, check out our entire series on Town hall in Microsoft Teams.
Well hello, and welcome back to our series on getting your event ready using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. By now you’re very familiar with Town Hall. We’ve run through the whole event, we’ve gone from deciding to use Town Hall all the way to getting our post-event analytics. Town Hall for Microsoft Teams is great, but maybe you need something more, like a TV broadcast. Maybe you need a branded background, or lower thirds with names and titles, or a sign language interpreter. Whatever the case, what you may be looking for is the RTMP toggle. So let’s learn a little bit about what that is, and along the way we’ll learn a little bit more about Worktank and how we can help your event be the best it can be.
Before we turn it on, let’s get into what RTMP even does. Long story short, RTMP helps Town Hall create a new source. If you think about the sort of native Town Hall event that we’ve created before, a source would be the presenter that you select to go live, or the screen share that you select to go live. You select these sources, and those are broadcast out for the audience to see. RTMP allows us to deliver a pro-grade broadcast as a selectable source within Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. This allows for a television broadcast level production within the familiar wrappings and engagement tools of a Town Hall event.
To turn it on, we’ll start in the Manage Event window of our Town Hall event. From here, go to Meeting Options and scroll all the way down to the bottom. Toggle RTMP-In to On and select Save. Now go back into Meeting Options and you’ll find a Server Ingest URL and Stream Key.
So here at Worktank, we run literally hundreds of virtual events a year for some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies on Earth, and we do it all utilizing RTMP. That’s what all these switchboards and mixers and monitors are for. It’s to take raw elements like presenter feeds, decks, and graphics, craft it all into a unified look, and stream that out as a selectable source.
Now, you could certainly do this at home without all the gear. There’s a free, open-source software called OBS that’s fantastic. Hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, use it for live streaming. You just give OBS the Server Ingest URL and Stream Key, and technically you’re in business. But, but, but, but, but, here’s the thing.
If you go with RTMP, you are increasing the technical complexity of your event, and increasing the technical complexity means you are increasing risk. And risk is where a team like Worktank comes in. The Worktank team is not only full of technical wizards who can ensure a flawless broadcast event, but broadcast and production professionals who understand how a live event should feel. It’s not just that we know that button does that thing, it’s that we have the experience to know when to press that button. So if your event has a complicated run of show, or is really graphics heavy, or has a hybrid component, or just has a ton of eyes on it and you need it to go perfectly, check us out at worktankglobal.com.
And with that, I want to thank you so much for watching our series on getting your event ready using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. Now that it’s over, what do you think? How’d we do? Did it help with your event? Are there any topics that we didn’t cover that you’d like to see? Are there any other topics you’d like to see us cover in the future? Let us know in the comments. For Worktank, my name’s Sean, and we’ll see you next time.
Hey, thanks so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more on all things live events, and check out our website at worktankglobal.com for more videos, blog posts, and information on how to take your event to the next level.
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Congrats, your event was a smashing success. Now comes the proof – how did you attendees respond and what did you learn to make your next event or broadcast an even bigger hit? In this episode we explore:
And other pro tips and tricks!
Well hello, and welcome back to our series on getting your event ready using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. Well gang, we did it. From deciding to use Town Hall all the way to going live, our steps worked and we had a really smooth event. Now that it’s over, I want some data. We want to know how many people came, how long they stayed, and for sure we need that recording. So let’s take a look at Town Hall’s native post-event reports.
From the Teams calendar, we’ll click on our event, and at the top you’ll see plenty of tabs, like Attendance and Q&A, but everything’s actually better organized than Manage Events, so we’ll click there. From here we’ll go to Reports on the left, and it says we only had one attendee, which, that’s not right. And you might run into this issue too. At the top, under this carrot, you’ll see different dates and times. Our event was on September 3rd. We’ll click that, and there we go, much better. I don’t know why it’s like this. It seems to be an artifact of like regular Teams meetings, anytime a presenter hops back on the call after you’ve ended the meeting, anytime maybe an attendee joins the call. Long story short, just make sure that you have the correct date and time selected first thing. So now we can see how many people attended, the start and end time of the meeting, the meeting duration, and the average attendance time. Below, we can also see specifics of everyone who joined. We can download a CSV of all of this at the top right.
And we can download our Q&A as a CSV file by clicking the carrot and clicking Q&A. If you just want to quickly preview the Q&A without opening Excel, you can navigate to the Q&A tab at the top of the event bar.
Let’s talk about the recording. There seems to be a thousand places that you can download the file, but Town Hall has sort of moved away from where in Teams Live Event an attendee could click the link when the event ended and then they saw the recording, which is unfortunate. But there’s a pretty nifty little email web page feature. From Manage Events, we’ll go to Recordings on the left, and here we can publish as is if we want. But if you want to be super extra, which we always do, let’s instead find the file in our SharePoint. A quick way to do that is to just click the recording, go to Open in Stream on the top right here, and once in Stream, you can select the file name and see where it lives.
So editing a live recording can be as simple or as complicated as you like. For simple, in Stream itself, if you’re in editing mode at the top right here, you can select Trim on the sidebar. Here you can at least cut the native Teams meeting slate at the beginning and the little ending slate that can be extremely long sometimes. You can also cut bits in the middle if you need to get rid of an entire section for whatever reason, but we don’t need to. So bing bing boom, done, and that’s edited. But let’s say you want to do way more, right? You want to replace a playback video with the actual file, or you want to do some audio correction or color or whatever. What you’re going to do is upload that file separately in your SharePoint, and we’ll link to it in a second. So back in Manage Event here, if all we did was trim a little in Stream itself, we’re good to go, this is the edited file. If you’ve uploaded a whole new export, select Publish from OneDrive, navigate to your video, and select it there. Before we hit publish, let’s triple check our theming is correct, because Town Hall is going to send the video out on like this branded web page, so we want to make sure that branding is correct. We’re good. So back in Recording, let’s hit publish.
Back in the Details tab, if you go down here, you’ll see this is the message all your presenters and attendees just got. So let’s select the View Recording button, and look at that, we got a nice little page. It’s got our branding, it has the edited recording file we want, our event details, and even includes the speakers. That’s pretty nice. Although you will notice there’s no ability to comment on the video, so for that you’ll have to send out the Stream link directly. These are your options otherwise.
Yo, that’s it. That’s how you do a Town Hall on Microsoft Teams event. You decide on Town Hall, you set up your Town Hall and Teams, you get your presenters and attendees invited, you set up your Q&A widget, have your presentation and your videos ready to share, you go live, and you get your post-event reports. So why do we have one more video in this series? Because there is a single toggle buried deep in the Manage Event menu that has the power to take your event from this, to this, or this, or even this. Next up, in our last video of this series, we marvel at the power of RTMP and get to know Worktank a little bit more in the process. But for now, what do you think? I really like Town Hall. I love that you can have multiple presenters on screen simultaneously, that’s something Teams Live Event could never do, but they are pretty different. Are there any features or updates in Town Hall you’d like to see in the future? Anything that you liked about Teams Live Events that you wish would carry over? Let us know in the comments. For Worktank, my name is Sean, and we’ll see you next time.
Hey, thanks so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more on all things live events, and check out our website at worktankglobal.com for more videos, blog posts, and information on how to take your event to the next level.
Introducing town hall in Microsoft Teams – a new enterprise event platform replacing Teams Live Event (TLE) which debuted in 2019.
Town hall comes with a dense set of new features and improves on all facets of presenter flow, audience engagement, and post-event reporting. Worktank has produced hundreds of global onsite, virtual and hybrid broadcasts through Microsoft Teams, making our team the go-to for creating best-of broadcast experiences for audience and presenters.
As town hall in Microsoft Teams makes its debut, we’re introducing a new multi-part series to show you how to harness new audience engagement features, tap powerful post-event reporting and new ways to highlight your presenters and their content.
In this introduction, we call out new features and how Town hall in Microsoft Teams bests the outgoing Live Events.
Microsoft is retiring Teams Live Events and giving us the new Teams Town Hall. So what is it? What’s the difference? What does it mean for you and your event? Well, let’s take a look at what separates Town Hall from Teams Live Events.
Up until very recently, a Teams Live Event, or a TLE, was Teams’s native virtual event option. It gave anyone labeled a producer the ability to choose exactly what the attendees were seeing. Now, at its core, the new Town Hall is the same idea. It gives anyone labeled a producer the ability to choose exactly what the attendees are seeing. Only now there’s some major improvements. I think most notably is the ability to have multiple presenters on screen simultaneously, which is huge. A big problem with TLE is you can only have one presenter on screen at a time, and this was a huge problem if they were trying to talk to each other. The transitions were laggy, you could only see one person, it was just, “our next presenter, Shan.”
“Hey everyone, thanks so much. My name is Shan, I’m a producer with Worktank. I’m really happy to be here at this event. So one of the things that we’re really excited right now is…”
It wasn’t great. But now with Town Hall, you can have up to seven presenters on screen simultaneously. You can also have multiple presenters and a deck being shared for group presentations.
Teams Town Hall has also made some major improvements in attendee interaction with a revamped Q&A widget. Moderators can now post discussion threads, and attendees are able to upvote, react, and reply to other questions and discussions. All of this is flexible and can be made as open or as controlled as the event organizer would like.
Once your event wraps, Town Hall provides some really deep analysis of your attendees and their level of engagement. With TLE, you would get a CSV of all the attendees, but we finally have some native analysis of that data, which is great.
Overall, the control and flexibility Town Hall offers your event is incredible, but it can seem a little unfamiliar. It’s new. So we’re going to spend the next several videos learning to make the best out of your Town Hall event. We’ll set one up from scratch and learn to manage presenters, we’ll get to know the Q&A widget, we’ll learn about accessibility features and how to uplevel your event to broadcast quality, we’ll look into that post-event report, and so much more. So join us while we pop open the hood of the new Teams Town Hall.
Town hall in Microsoft Teams has recently been launched as a replacement for Teams Live Events. We continue to examine the functionality here, in part 2 of our 8-part series examining the functionality and common how-tos of this new platform.
With so many factors to consider when you host virtual or hybrid events, learning a new event platform can seem extra demanding. In the video, Shaun Parker affirms that he is a fan of the new town hall platform and features, and that it is worth learning.
In this clip, we dive into how you set up a live event for the first time.
We created an 8-part series on how to get the most from town hall in Microsoft Teams. In episode 3/8, we show you how to:
Invite attendees and publish – TA DA!
Well hello, welcome back to our ongoing series on how to get your event ready using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. We’ve already discussed what’s new in Town Hall, and we’ve begun to set up our own event of Worktank All Hands using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams, so be sure to check out those videos if you haven’t. For now, we need to get our presenters and our attendees invited, so let’s hop into it. So in our calendar, we’re going to go to our Worktank All Hands event that we created in the last video. We have this event right now.
Our branded look sort of natively has this purplish thing. Our Worktank brand is gray, orange, and whites, a little bit more minimal, so we’re going to want to change that. So up here we go to Manage Event. Let’s go to theming.
Right here on the left, you’ll see that we have the ability to change a few things. So we’re going to change our banner image, and there we go. We can zoom in, we can keep it out, keep it out. I think that fits. Same thing with the logo. For our theme color, we can’t actually be too specific at the moment right now, which is a little unfortunate, but they have most of the spectrum, so you can kind of get close enough. And there we go. So now if we go to emails over here, our invitation.
We can preview, and it looks a little bit more like this. So this is what people will get in their inbox. It’ll be a little bit more Worktank-y. So we need to invite some of these people, though, so let’s go back to details. At the bottom here, we have presenters and co-organizers.
So presenters, let’s say most people from your organization will be added already. It’ll sort of, it’s like any sort of Teams meeting, it knows who’s in your network. So we’ll go ahead and do these folks here who aren’t real. And our co-organizers, a little bit different than presenters. Co-organizers are sort of a co-producer for you. They are able to take people live, they’re able to end the meeting, they’re able to sort of control certain things that regular presenters aren’t.
It is very important that you add some co-organizers before you change anything else. I have noticed, and hopefully this gets updated, but I have noticed that if you make a change to, let’s say, the Q&A widget, and then try to add a co-organizer, it’s sort of locked. So you need to make sure your co-organizers are set before you really get started too heavily. So we’ll say producer one is going to be our co-organizer.
So let’s also say we have some external presenters, which you probably do, so they’re not in your specific network. There, here you can add anybody. Our event access, your organization, anybody within the Worktank sphere here, whatever company you are with, only they can see it. Any sort of public person isn’t going to be able to come in unless you add them as external. Public, anybody can come in. People in groups, more specific. We’ll keep your organization for us right now. Invite attendees, there are two ways to do this. Two ways you can play. You can add people directly. This is how they’re going to get that themed email. You can do groups, which is nice, so we have a group called Fireside at Worktank. That one email is going to shoot off to several people. The other way that you can handle this is to not add any attendees here, and instead, once you set the event, send the URL to a link shortener or something. Maybe it’s a link on your website. The benefit of that is if anything in the back end needs to change, you need to make a different event, you need to pivot hard, you don’t have to update it to people. They just have to click the link, and you change the link, and they will never even know that you had to change where that directs to. Cons: you have to invite them to that specifically and make a whole look for that. That’s the nice thing about Town Hall, so you don’t have to worry about that. So that’s a, just want to put that out there. For now, we’re going to add our Fireside folks, and let’s double check everything.
We have our name, love it. We have our date and time, happy about that. We have our description. We have a co-organizer. We have a member of the team that’s going to be able to help us out. We have our presenters signed up. We have some external presenters, and we know we’re sending it to our Fireside group. We know our theme, we’re happy with that. So let’s go up to save. Before you hit save, something to note: hitting save at this point, an invite will get sent out to the presenters, not the attendees. We’ll get to the attendees in a moment, but saving here does send that out to presenters, so some folks will get an email. So let’s go and hit save. And now we’re ready. We’re excited for this to go out to everybody. Getting published is going to send out our themed email to our attendees.
So let’s go ahead and hit publish. Ready to publish? We’re going to do it. Let’s do it. That’s it. Invites are sent out. Presenters now know where to go. Our attendees are getting excited, they got these gorgeous invites. But once we are live, how are attendees communicating with us? What’s that look like? In our next video, we’re going to take a good look at the new and improved Q&A widget in Town Hall on Microsoft Teams. But for now, for Worktank, my name is Sean, and I’m curious, what do you think about the new branded invite look? Are there any presenter or attendee invite features you’d like to see in the future? Let us know in the comments, along with any other questions you have about Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. Until next time, thanks for watching.
Hey, thanks so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more on all things live events, and check out our website at worktankglobal.com for more videos, blog posts, and information on how to take your event to the next level.
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In episode 4/ 8 of our deep dive series on the robust features of town hall in Microsoft Teams, we show you how to set up the Q&A widget prior to your event go-live, including:
Well hello, welcome back to our ongoing series on getting your virtual event ready using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. We’re getting close to our event. We’ve learned what’s new in Town Hall, we’ve set up our event in Teams, and we’ve sent a branded invite to our presenters and attendees. Before we go live, let’s take a look at how our attendees are going to engage with the event using the new and improved Q&A widget.
From the Teams calendar, we’re going to select our Town Hall event. We have a nice branded look, check out our last video. Up at the top, we’re going to go to Q&A, and you’ll find some Q&A settings. So let’s go through these real fast.
Questions: We have this enabled. Attendees can ask questions, they’ll have a little chat box, they can ask “what’s your favorite color?” If you turn questions off, attendees cannot post anything on their own, but you as a moderator can post discussion threads, and people can react and respond to that.
Replies: If an attendee asks “what’s your favorite color,” and you have replies turned on, a different attendee can reply to that and say “blue.” This creates sort of conversation threads.
Anonymous posts: If this is turned on, attendees can select a little checkbox when they ask a question, and their question will be anonymous. However, replies and reactions will not be anonymous. It is only asking a question that will be anonymous.
And finally, moderate questions. In Teams Live Events, the Q&A widget was moderated, you couldn’t turn it off. Now in Town Hall, you can keep it off, or you can turn it on. Keeping moderate questions off means your Q&A will be wide open for attendees. Once anyone asks a question, all attendees will be able to see it. Turning moderate questions on will make it so that a moderator has to approve questions before they are pushed out to the audience. Here you’ll see the option to publish, which pushes it out to everyone, or dismiss, which clears the question entirely and no one will know the difference. Once a question is published, people can react and comment on it, just like we’ve been looking at. This may feel a little bit more familiar if you’ve been using Teams Live Events.
Two big gotchas with moderate questions I want to get into very quickly. One is written in red right underneath it, which is that once you turn on moderate questions and hit save, you cannot turn it off. I don’t know why. Similarly, if you turn it on and hit save, you can’t then add co-organizers to act as moderators. I do not know why that’s the case. I’m sure it’s not supposed to be, and I hope it gets fixed soon, but I have run into this issue, and I don’t want anyone else to as well. So I do recommend just leaving it off until you’re very buttoned up, and then you can turn it on later. That said, for our event, I want questions and replies, I’ll allow anonymous posts, and we can go ahead and hit save.
And that’s about it. So our pre-show setup within Teams is more or less done. All that’s left is sort of everything else. We got to get our decks ready, we got to make sure our videos are ready to go. So in our next video, we’re going to take a look at the best practices of sharing out decks and videos within Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. Until then, what do you think about the new Q&A widget? Are there any features that you’d like to see moving forward? Let us know in the comments, along with any other questions or thoughts that you have about Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. For Worktank, my name is Sean, thanks so much for watching.
Hey, thanks so much for watching. Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more on all things live events, and check out our website at worktankglobal.com for more videos, blog posts, and information on how to take your event to the next level.
If you’ve experienced choppy video or missed slide cues during a town hall, we’ll guide you on how to avoid these issues in the new town hall in Microsoft Teams. Whether you’re a presenter or a co-organizer, we’ll show you how to:
Hey, welcome back to our series on getting your event ready using Town Hall and Microsoft Teams. We’re almost ready to go live. We’ve set up our event in Teams, we’ve invited our presenters and attendees, and we’ve set up our Q&A widget. Before we go live, you probably have a deck that you want to share out, maybe a couple videos. So in this video, we’re going to take a look at the best practices and a couple gotchas on sharing out decks and videos in Town Hall.
So Town Hall and Microsoft Teams, as I’m recording this currently, does not support PowerPoint Live. It’s coming, they say it’s coming, so hopefully it is here soon. But as of now, it does not, which means anytime you share out a deck, it’s essentially just a screen share, which means a second monitor is very helpful. So if you’re using a single monitor like this, when you share out your screen, or even a window, you just see this. So to control the deck, you need to go full screen, which means that you can’t then see the other presenters or the chat window. So having a second monitor sort of just dedicated as the screen share, it’s really nice, because then your other monitor can be the chat window and seeing the presenters.
If your presenters want to control their own slides and they don’t have a second monitor or anything, I really recommend using something like Internet Clicker. Internet Clicker is a PowerPoint plugin that allows your presenters to control the deck remotely. There’s other products that do similar things, Internet Clicker is just the one I’ve used, but I really like it. It allows you as a producer to be fully in charge of sharing out the deck, which means less hiccups, and it gives presenters the ability to control the deck while also seeing everyone else in the chat.
One other thing to know about sharing out a deck with Town Hall that they changed from Teams Live Events: in Teams Live Events, you could have your deck act almost as another presenter in the list of presenters. They got rid of that with Town Hall, so now if you want to share a deck, you have to go up and hit share screen, and then when you want to take it off screen, you stop sharing. So that’s slides. Secondary monitor, really useful to the point of kind of being necessary. Internet Clicker, really really helpful. If you don’t want to use a remote clicker that costs money, I totally get it, I still would recommend having one person sort of drive the slides, it just keeps things a little bit tidier.
Let’s talk about videos. If you have some videos embedded in your deck and you’re sharing it out, they can look like this.
[Music]
“Hey everybody, so sorry I couldn’t be there today, but I just want to say have a great all hands, and I cannot wait to see what we accomplish this year.”
It’s not perfect. The frame rate’s super out of whack. It’s just something that happens with PowerPoint. Really hoping that Town Hall gets that PowerPoint Live soon. PowerPoint Live handles videos really really well, which, you know, will take care of that issue entirely.
For now, a solid workaround is to use a virtual camera. Here we’ll open OBS, which is a free, open-source software. We’re going to upload our video, hit virtual camera, and now in our call we can switch our camera to the NDI feed, and then go back to OBS and hit start. Is this perfect? Not really. But it’s really good, and it is miles ahead of what you’re going to get out of the PowerPoint playback. And if you’re not familiar with OBS and all that looks like a lot, don’t worry. There are hundreds of videos on YouTube about it, there’s thousands of forums, it’s a really vibrant community. It’s a free download, try it out, have some fun with it. Once you get good at it, there’s an entire world that’ll open up to you.
That’s all for today. Our deck is uploaded, we have our second monitor ready, and we’re going to run Internet Clicker so that some of our presenters can click through on their own. We have our videos uploaded to OBS, I’m going to roll them back as a virtual camera, we’ll make it like a presenter. And next video we go live, and we’re going to get way into the nitty-gritty of what that looks like. Until then, what features would you like to see for sharing out decks and videos? Are you excited about PowerPoint Live? Let us know in the comments. For Worktank, my name is Sean, we’ll see you next time.
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