TL;DR
Microsoft has announced that Teams Live Events will be retired for commercial customers on 30th September 2024, and the functionality will be replaced with Town halls, which will be available from early October 2023.

Details
Microsoft want to create a unified experience for users creating small meetings, customer-facing webinars, or company-wide town halls. They are introducing Town halls in Microsoft Teams, a new experience to host and deliver large-scale, internal events.. Town halls will provide a one-to-many format with production capabilities and a structured approach for attendee engagement. With town halls, you can host various types of internal as well as external events including company-wide town halls, all hands, global team meetings, internal broadcasts, fireside chats, and more.  Advanced capabilities will be available for Teams Premium customers. 

You have 12-months to prepare for the retirement and transition off Teams Live Events.  After 30th September 2024, Teams Live Events will no longer be supported, and access will be discontinued. Existing recordings will be available to access until 31st December 2024, so download any you want to keep beyond this date.

Basic town hall functionality in Microsoft 365 and Office 365 E1/E3/E5/A3/A5 offerings provide the following capabilities:

  • Attendee capacity of 10,000 attendees (20,000 for premium)
  • Host up to 15 concurrent events across a tenant
  • Co-organizer support
  • Automated invitation and event recording emails
  • Green room
  • Manage what attendees see
  • RTMP-in
  • RTMP-out
  • On-demand recording 
  • Live translation captions (up to 6 languages)
  • Live transcription (AI-generated)
  • AI-generated captions
  • Third-party eCDN and Microsoft eCDN support
  • Attendee reporting

The Town hall template can be found in the Teams client via Calendar > New meeting dropdown > The Town hall feature will reside between the Webinar and Virtual Appointment options.

Create a Town hall:



Complete the details:


Microsoft: “In the template, organizers can write the title and event description, set the date and time, invite co-organizers, internal presenters, and attendees. Inviting attendees is scoped by default to Your Organization which allows attendees who are within your organization and guests to enter the event session. Public setting allows the event to be accessed by any individual with the join link (this is only recommended for public, non-confidential events). Additionally, you can toggle “Only allow Invited people to join” for Your Organization events to enforce access only to attendees explicitly invited in the Town hall template form.

Selecting “Save and Send” informs Presenters and Co-Organizers via email of the event while in draft. The Publish button formally invites all attendees, presenters and co-organizers to the event. Once the event has been saved and published, the organizer can use the following tabs to manage their event:

  • The Theming tab allows email customization for the Event Invite
  • The Emails tab allows deeper customization to the Event Invite as well as the email for Recording link
  • The reports tab presents post session analytics”.

You can customise your Town hall event in Meeting Options. The Meeting options will have pre-configured settings to enable a large scale, structured event. You can edit default settings for features such as the Green room, Q&A, Manage what attendees see, and RTMP-In etc.


Teams premium adds capacity for up to 20K attendees, first-party eCDN support, additional language support for live translated captions, email customisation, and more apparently.

Availability
Town Halls available from early October 2023.
Live Events retirement: 30th September 2024.

Source, related links, and references
MC678003 (Live Events retirement).
MC678002 (Microsoft Teams Town halls)
Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 123148.
Images: Microsoft.
Read even more and view some great screen-shots: Introducing Town Halls in Microsoft Teams and Retiring Microsoft Teams Live Events – Microsoft Community Hub.

Page originally published
29th September 2023 and kept up to date.

Want to know what else is late, new, and coming soon across M365 and Teams this month? Check out the latest roundup.

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