How To: Broadcast Pre-Recorded Video with Audio on Microsoft Teams Live Event

How To Broadcast Pre-Recorded Video with Audio on Microsoft Teams Live Event

As most companies nowadays are starting to engage with cloud technologies as part of the company's productivity, collaboration tools have been the topmost requirement. 

There are a lot of applications readily available in the market (Paid or Free) but for Enterprise use, we can only name a few. Considering the security and reliability of the product and as a User-Friendly solution.

Then Microsoft came into the picture with Microsoft Teams...

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration

This can be acquired as a free license or with a paid O365 subscription.

(See plans here)

Aside from the common features mentioned above, Microsoft Teams has a lot of additional features. One of these features is Live Events.

With Teams live events, users in your organization can broadcast video and meeting content to large online audiences.

Microsoft 365 live events bring live video streaming to a new level, encouraging connection throughout the entire engagement lifecycle with attendees before, during, and after live events. You can create a live event wherever your audience, team, or community resides, using Microsoft Teams.

Live Events are a great way to connect with your workforce and external partners. It can also help with the team's adoption in a situation where you are already planning to roll out Teams and need another tool to demonstrate a great product feature.

HOWEVER...

There are still limitations to this feature. One of the highly requested function is to be able to broadcast a pre-recorded video in a live event. There are already a lot of community discussions going on encouraging Microsoft to roll out this feature sooner.

As of this writing, broadcasting a pre-recorded video to a Teams Live event will only result in the video being played without the audio included. 

For us, we cannot wait and we need to make our own solution to this.

In this blog post, I will be showing you how to broadcast pre-recorded videos on a Microsoft Teams live event.

Pre-requisites:

• A Dedicated device for the video presenter
• Device must be running Windows 10 Pro or Later with 64bit OS architecture
• Download and install this Virtual Audio Driver (Download here)
• A valid and active O365 license or Teams License

Procedure:

Note: This must be done on the presenter's machine.

Configuring the Device:

 
1. Download the Virtual Audio Driver from the link above
2. Extract the contents of the downloaded file
3. Run the VBCABLE_Setup_x64.exe as Administrator
4. Follow the on-screen instructions and restart the computer

5. After restarting the device go to Control Panel and select sound

6. On the playback tab, select the VB-Audio Virtual Cable device and set as Default.

7. Click on the Recording tab and Select the VB-Audio Virtual Cable device and set as Default.

8. On the same tab, click the VB-Audio Virtual Cable device and select Properties.

9. On the new window, navigate to "Playback through this device:" drop-down menu and select the device we have configured on Step No. 6.

The idea is to transmit all system audio in the Virtual Microphone which will be used to broadcast in Microsoft Teams

Configuring the Microsoft Teams Application

 1. Open the Microsoft Teams Desktop App and join to the Teams Live Event

Reminder: This setting is required before you start the live event broadcast.

For the full guide on how to schedule a Microsoft Teams Live Event, click this link.

2. Head over to the settings button

3.  On the settings pane, change the Microphone to Cable Output (VB-Audio Virtual Cable). This is the default Recording Device that we have set on the previous steps.

Note: Make sure that the microphone is not Muted:

4. Navigate to the video you want to play and play it in Full-Screen mode.

5. Go back to the Teams Live event and click on share. Select the video that you have played on Step 4.

6. On the Queue panel, select the video that you have shared on Step 5.

7. Click on the Send live button and Click on Start.

After successfully following the above steps, you will now be able to broadcast a pre-recorded video with audio on a Teams Live event.

Important Reminder:

If the event has multiple number of presenters, other presenters must be muted. Because when another presenter is transmitting his audio, the audio from the current presenter will be cut off.

Pros:

• Can be achieved without additional cost
• Can be done on a single device
• Audio quality is excellent
• No additional hardware required
• Can be initiated by a user without deep level technical knowledge

Cons:

• The presenter cannot hear the sound of the device since all the audio will be transmitted to the virtual microphone that is being used in the Teams Application. If the presenter wants to monitor the output of the live event audio, he/she will need to join the event from a separate device (mobile, desktop, etc.)
• Requires basic technical knowledge

Tried and Tested using:

• Windows 10 Enterprise (1909) 64-bit architecture
• O365 Plan E3