Guide24 June 2026
Teams, Zoom or a broadcast? Knowing which one your event needs
Video conferencing platforms and broadcast production solve different problems. Confusing them is the most common reason a hybrid event disappoints everyone.
Daniel Wilkinson
Founder and Operations Director, dwmedia
What a conferencing platform is for
Teams, Zoom and Google Meet are built for conversation between participants. Everyone can speak, everyone can be seen, and the platform decides who is on screen based on who is talking.
That is exactly right for a meeting. It is wrong for an audience, because an audience is not participating and the automatic switching has no editorial judgement.
What a broadcast production is for
A production has a director choosing what the viewer sees, a mix engineer choosing what they hear, and graphics identifying who is speaking. The output goes to a platform, which can still be Teams or Zoom, or can be YouTube, a website player or a ticketed page.
The key point: broadcast production and conferencing platforms are not alternatives. You can produce a proper multi-camera show and deliver it into Teams. The production is the input, the platform is the pipe.
How to tell which you need
- Under about thirty people, all expected to speak: conferencing platform. A production adds cost and no value.
- A meeting with a presenter and a passive audience under a hundred: conferencing platform, but fix the audio and the camera in the room. Most of these fail on a laptop microphone at the end of a boardroom table, not on the platform.
- An audience over a hundred, or an event with a stage: production. At that size people are watching rather than participating, and watching an unproduced feed is hard work.
- Anything external facing: production. Customers, members, press and public form a view of your organisation from how it looks. Internal audiences forgive things external ones do not.
- Anything where the recording will be used afterwards: production. A recorded conference call ages badly. A produced session can be cut into clips that do useful work for a year.
The middle option people miss
A single operated camera with proper audio, feeding into your existing Teams or Zoom meeting, costs a fraction of a full production and fixes the two things that actually make internal streams unwatchable. Worth considering before jumping to either extreme.
More on hybrid events and multi-camera production.
Written by
Daniel Wilkinson
Founder and Operations Director, dwmedia
Dan has run live production since 2014, from single-camera council committee streams to sixty-date arena tours. He has worked in 18 UK arenas including The O2, the AO Arena and the OVO Hydro, and covers 16 or more festivals and 30 or more arena dates a year. He writes these from the job rather than from a desk.