My users have conducted Teams webcasts for 40+ attendees, frequently video chat with groups of 8+
How are you finding the Teams limitation of only 9 people on screen at once in a videoconference? That is the one major flaw that Teams lags the competition in, e.g. Zoom.
Personally, I can't see a reason to see these many people at one time.
Nine people on the screen is a nice ratio, and if the 10th person says something, they take the place of the person that hasn't said anything the longest on the grid.
There are other reasons I dislike Teams, but this isn't one of them.
they take the place of the person that hasn't said anything the longest on the grid
This is just a recipe for excluding people who don't speak up. In a larger meeting I particularly want to prompt juniors to speak up, for example. I also want juniors to see each other so they feel more a part of it.
If you are only interested in the last person to speak that's fine but you might as well just use a voice call for that.
Voice calls would reduce Zoom fatigue. I’d argue having everyone on screen at once is an edge case, and one that causes more stress than benefit to participants.
I turn my video off during video conference calls, but others may not feel they have the autonomy to do so.
Then it is on you, as the moderator, to step up and call on these silent participants. If not then get tooling that does but, FYI, none of the major video platforms have an option to avoid your recipe for exclusion.
Honest question, but why would I want to see more than 9 people in a video conference?
My vision of video conference is that one person is sharing their screen or something, why would I want to watch other peoples avatars or rooms in all kinds of video quality
If you are a trainer, then having immediate access to all the attendees is fairly important.
I'm in the process of "refactoring" my training approach to a videoconference approach (using Zoom).
I'm actually really surprised at how intimidating the process has been. I've been doing training and speaking in person for a long time, but not via Zoom.
It will work out, but the biggest issue that I'm encountering, is not having access to "immediate feedback."
Virtually all my teaching is online, in a dedicated tool. Of course I used slides and approach to teaching that i inherited from previous teachers of the course - which includes heavy use of polling using the builtin easy polling feature of our online class tool (collaborate ultra).
Once i taught a guest lecture in zoom. I ended up using directpoll.com to approach the polling features I'd normally use. Lots of yes/no questions, easily asked and answered (always same url, can watch answers coming in), some exercises.
Extremely positive response. Simple, oft-used interaction truly is a game changer - even if limited to yes/no.
Honest question, but why would I want to see more than 9 people in a video conference?
Because it more closely mimics the experience of being in a room. For example maybe I want to listen to, or be, the person speaking while gauging reactions from facial expressions. I have a 30" 4k monitor, I can easily have 20-30 faces on screen at once in software that supports it.
If you read the MS forums there are plenty of complaints about this, a typical use case is a teacher or lecturer who wants to see their entire class.
I am totally OK with the number of faces on screen at once being a user-configurable parameter in the client - but 9 is a hard limit baked into Teams.
Also, if you are a host/co-host, the order of the "Participants" list keeps shifting. I end up accidentally muting/unmuting people, because their position changed between my moving the cursor over their name, and clicking.
How is that a limitation? The person speaking should have focus and even then can you guarantee that everyone is going to use video? The side bar chat is a good feature for running conversations while another is presenting.
FWIW We are still dealing with the four persons on screen limitation and even then there is a good chance of no one having video. Management wisely decided against forcing the issue. Plus throw in that many times we end up with someone sharing their screen.
No one turns on the video at our corporation. Everyone only uses audio. We've actually hit the 250 user limit on some of these Teams conference calls (major outage, all departments needed help), and not one of them bothered with video.
How are you finding the Teams limitation of only 9 people on screen at once in a videoconference? That is the one major flaw that Teams lags the competition in, e.g. Zoom.