How to live stream a Microsoft Teams meeting to YouTube without installing additional software

Live streaming Teams meetings and webinars to YouTube may expand your audience and allow for more viewers to engage with your event than otherwise might. It’s great for running a virtual conference or event where you need to embed YouTube videos in the platform for a streamlined approach. YouTube also saves your live streams as videos in your channel without the need to do a separate upload after an event. This concept gives users/presenters the ease of just having a normal Teams meeting, but the power of enhanced broadcasting and distribution.

Though I’m focused on YouTube in this blog post, the same setup on the Teams side is required to live stream to social media platforms or otherwise.

Thanks to recent updates to Microsoft Teams, you no longer need OBS Studio or other third-party software installations to live stream your Microsoft Teams events to YouTube. However, this ability launched in disabled state by default, so a Teams Administrator will need to complete the prerequisites prior to someone being able to live stream.

Admin prerequisites to live streaming with Microsoft Teams

Before users can broadcast their live stream from Microsoft Teams, a Teams administrator needs to create or modify a Meeting policy and:

• Enable Live Streaming Mode (General section)
• Turn on Local Broadcasting (Audio & video section)

You can modify the Global (Org-wide) default Meeting policy which would allow everyone to broadcast and live stream, or you can create/modify a separate Meeting policy and apply it only to specific users who should be allowed to live stream.

Here’s how to modify the Global (Org-wide) default meeting policy to allow everyone in your org to live stream:

1. Go to the Teams admin center (https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/)
2. Select Meetings | Meeting policies
3. Select the name of the policy you wish to modify. In this example, Global (Org-wide) default).

4. Enable Live streaming mode, and turn on Local broadcasting as seen in the following screenshot.

Technically, you could just enable Live streaming mode for this post. But by also turning on Local broadcasting (NDI), your users will have greater flexibility to produce their Microsoft Teams events with broadcasting software like OBS Studio, XSplit, etc. which gives additional capabilities like setting up scenes and such.

5. Click Save

Your users will now be able to live stream their Teams events. Now let’s go through those steps.

Producer prerequisites to live streaming with Microsoft Teams

If you are going to be the producer of an upcoming event, you’ll need to make a change to your individual Teams client settings before you’re able to proceed.

Simply open your settings in Teams (ellipsis/three dots by your profile picture | Settings) and then select App permissions. Here you can enable NDI capabilities.

How to live stream a Microsoft Teams meeting or webinar to YouTube

Users assigned the policy created or modified in the admin prerequisite section can follow these steps to live stream directly to YouTube from Microsoft Teams.

1. First we need to set up the live event on the YouTube side. Go to YouTube Studio (https://studio.youtube.com) and sign in with the account you wish to broadcast to.
2. Click Create | Go live in the upper right

3. Choose whether you’re going live Right now, or whether you’re just setting up for a Later date. Either way, you’ll have additional steps that may vary from this post – follow the prompts to complete setup.

4. Continue through your YouTube prompts but do not go live yet. When you get out of the wizard, be sure you’re on the Stream tab on the left-hand navigation and locate the Stream key and Stream URL. You’ll need to copy both of these and use them later in step 9.

5. Now we need to switch to Microsoft Teams. Join the meeting or webinar you wish to live stream.
6. Add the Custom Streaming app to the meeting

7. Click Add

8. Click Save

9. In the right-hand panel that opens, paste the Stream key and Stream URL you copied in step 4.

10. Click Start streaming in the lower right, then select Allow in the dialog box when it appears.

11. You’re now live streaming! Share your screen and/or use your cameras and microphones to run your event as you would any normal Microsoft Teams meeting.

12. When you’re finished with the event, you can stop streaming via Teams and YouTube.