In September 2023, Microsoft announced that the Live Events feature for its Teams online meeting service would be shutting down on September 30, 2024. It also announced its replacement, Town Hall, which offers features like having multiple live presenters online and more.
Today, Microsoft announced an update for those plans. It has decided not to retire Teams Live Events on September 30 as planned. In a blog post, it stated:
We’ve spoken with customers and understand how important it is to ensure a smooth transition to town hall. We are committed to making it as easy and beneficial as possible for customers to experiment, adopt, and implement town hall as their destination for large-scale digital events, as well as allow customers to upgrade from Live Events to town hall on their own schedule.
The blog post did not offer a new date for when Teams Live Events will no longer be available.
Microsoft says the new Town Hall feature in Teams saw "significant increases in new customers" during the last quarter. It has plans to add new functions to Town Hall over the coming months:
Attendees will soon be able to express their feedback and engagement through live reactions, streaming chat and presenters can interact with their audience via raise hands. Advanced production experiences such as the producer role, queuing shared content and preview scene support are also coming to town hall, providing a new level of event execution capabilities.
Microsoft also plans to add features similar to what's available in Teams Live Events to Town Hall over the next 12 months. That includes the ability to queue shared content, preview scenes, and add a producer role. It will also add more interactive and engagement functions like voting, archiving questions, exporting questions to a CSV file, and a way to download Q&A reports
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