Using a VTC to present into a Microsoft Teams Live Events with Pexip

What's in this post...

Last Updated on May 17, 2019 by GrahamWalsh

So you have a Microsoft Teams meeting and you want to do a Microsoft Teams Live Events. Not a problem, you can schedule this right inside Teams. Now imagine you wanted to use a meeting room to present from, that has a Cisco, Poly, Lifesize, Yealink etc VTC device. Obviously this is much better than using your laptop webcam as you have good cameras and microphones setup. I had previous blogged about using Skype Meeting Broadcast too here.

There is also a good overview from Microsoft on their site here.

With Pexip Cloud Video Interop, this is possible and I’ll show you below in the following steps.

Step One – Create a Teams Meeting

In your Microsoft Teams Client, create a new Meeting and change the meeting type to a Live Event.

Step Two – Select Meeting Type

Now to allow the use of an External App or Encoder, you must select People and groups or Org-Wide. If you select a Public event, then you can’t use an external encoder.

Features within an External app or device

Step Three – Join the Meeting from a Teams client

When joining a Teams live event as a producer, you must use the installable client, you cannot use the web browser.

Next you need to actually Start Setup to being the Live Meeting and so you can connect the RTMP stream to the Teams Live Events

Step Four – Connecting Pexip CVI and Teams Live Events

Now browse to the Pexip WebRTC Conference node or open the Pexip Infinity App and click on Content only.

Now enter a Virtual Meeting Room and select Connect

Now click on the … and then Start the Meeting (if needed)

Now Add Participant and Paste in the RTMP link that you can find in the Teams Meeting. Make sure you add /MSStream to the URL and click Call in.

You will now see the RTMP connection to the Teams Live Event

Now add in the Meeting Room VTC to the meeting and answer on the device.

Now you’ll see the VTC in the Teams Live Event

Step Five – Present from a VTC

To present any content that can be connected to the VTC, so you could plug in your content source cable or in my case I am going use Cisco Proximity to share over wireless to the VTC system.