With Microsoft Teams Live Events ,we have an alternative to stream them from outside encoding sources. There are few advantages of playing out this activity from an external application. We can customize the presentation deck by including various sources and there is an option to include multiple cameras and cumulate them on the same deck.

So here I caught some eye over this subject to investigate this alternative from an open source free tool OBS Studio . The installer can be downloaded and installed on the PC from where we are going to stream the live event from this app OBS Studio. And they are present in the list of Supported Encoders provided by Microsoft.

Well before we setup the OBS studio the mandatory part is we need to schedule a live event to generate the URL to build up the connection between them.

So created live event with org wide option.

In the next screen choose the option external app or device.

The moment when the live event is created we could see the server ingest url is been generated. So now the required url to establish the connection from OBS has been generated here we need to populate this value on the OBS studio app.

From the OBS Studio app navigate to settings

Navigate to stream – in the service select Custom and populate the server URL that was copied from the generated live event. Its mandatory to paste the stream key over here. You can paste some random numbers and that will become your stream key. This part is completed and you can click on apply.

Customization of the presentation Deck

Now we need to go to scene and create a new scene.

Once that is done we have option to add the source. We could see over here that there are ample of options available over here to modify our presentation deck.

Furthermore when selected the video capture device , we do have the opportunity to add multiple cameras over here with our own customization.

When further drilled down into the configure video option we can see options. I was able to change zoom, focus and exposure and might change here based on the camera that is connected.

We have options to add images, media and browsers which might be beneficial during the live event from the same deck. For instance below is an example to add the media video. The tool really seems to be powerful in providing additional options on customization of the deck.

Once the customization is done we are good to go to start the setup.

After that we click on start streaming from the OBS Studio. Once the session is started we can see the frames per second ratio which is ready to stream on Teams Live events.

Then from Teams live event you can click on start event.

Finally we can see the live events streaming from external encoder app. Below is a sample where we can see the state it says encoder preview and the customized deck with images and browser page.

Regards

Sathish Veerapandian