Delivering Professional Grade Broadcasts with New Microsoft Teams Integrations

As we continue to navigate the world of hybrid events, it’s become clear that the need to enable remote production and real-time editing and collaboration is critical to deliver professional grade broadcasts. Microsoft Teams has been a key source for remote contribution by bringing in live media feeds from all around the world into event experiences.

Today at the NAB Show, we’re excited to announce new Microsoft Teams broadcasting integrations through our broadcast development kit (BDK) and partnerships with industry leaders, including Evertz, Avid, Epiphan, and LiveArena. Through these new integrations, producers can leverage Teams in their broadcast, production, and live event workflows to deliver a seamless event experience from anywhere in the world.

Evertz

We previously released our broadcast development kit (BDK) for Microsoft Teams last year and our Evertz partner had begun integration with our BDK for Teams to connect with their web-based BRAVO Studio. Now we’re excited to share that Evertz’s BRAVO Studio and our BDK integration has been completed and is generally available. This integration enables remote announcers and contributors to use Microsoft Teams to participate in the live event production and helps deliver a professionally produced, high quality live experience on any platform. BRAVO Studio is a virtual production solution powered by Azure that allows content creators to tell their stories from anywhere like a professional. BRAVO Studio mixes video and audio feeds from remote sources using Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) or Reliable Internet Streaming Transport (RIST). BRAVO Studio integrates with Microsoft Teams by the BDK, where individual participants of a Teams meeting are treated as individual sources for the production. The Teams BDK also enables the output from BRAVO Studio to be shared within a Teams Meeting for corporate town halls, annual general meetings, and large community events.

Avid

Avid and Microsoft Teams are enabling real-time editing and collaboration through their latest integration with our BDK, and we’re excited to highlight the preview of Avid’s over-the-shoulder capability. This new capability delivers ‘over the shoulder’ remote collaboration through Avid’s Media Composer video editing software. It allows video producers and teams to review, edit, and share approvals live while on the go with secure streaming to any device (desktop, decoders, mobile devices, video players, and set top boxes including Apple TV). The over-the-shoulder experience leverages the Teams BDK to bring the video directly from Media Composer at sub-second speeds enabled by SRT and stream high-resolution content into a live Teams call.

Epiphan

Epiphan and Microsoft Teams are making broadcast quality live streaming more accessible and we’re excited to share the preview of Epiphan Connect. This new cloud-based tool extracts up to nine Microsoft Teams participant feeds and one screen share and brings them into any device or software capable of decoding the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) streaming protocol. You can display those feeds in your production up to 1080p (at 30 frames per second) and with isolated audio. The new tool lets you leverage branded layouts, live switching, dynamic titles and graphics, and other features seen in professional broadcasts, without sacrificing convenience.

LiveArena

LiveArena and Microsoft Teams are enabling a fully automated broadcasting process through the integration with our BDK and enabling anyone to become a professional broadcaster with their Ai Producer capability. This new capability helps to fully automate the process of composing and broadcasting presentations. Fully integrated with Microsoft Teams, AI Producer is available as a Teams meeting extension directly in the Microsoft Teams app store. The intelligent AI takes care of the whole process, taking your content, adding a vivid production layer, and delivering it to the distribution platform of your choice. In addition, you’ll be able to broadcast from a Teams meeting into another Teams meeting or webinar for live viewing – or to your own OneDrive folder for later sharing and viewing, all keeping with the fully automated, AI driven production capabilities.

We’re excited to continue to expand Microsoft Teams to enable a full suite of solutions for remote contribution for any production configuration. And now with our latest integrations we’ve announced today, Microsoft Teams supports generating content for your broadcast across all connections, whether it’s a part of the production workflow with NDI over the local network, via SDI from AJA and Blackmagic Designs hardware, distribution through RTMP, and deep integrations with Evertz, Avid, and Epiphan for sub-second latency via SRT.

If you’re at the show, come swing by our Microsoft booth, W3017, located in the new West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, to see our partners and Microsoft Teams integrations in action. We look forward to seeing you there!