Aaron Steele, Microsoft Technical Program Manager talks about NDI with Microsoft Teams

Aaron Steele, Microsoft Technical Program Manager takes us through what is Network Device Interface (NDI) and how can it be used to broadcast Teams meeting content, and how organizations like the NBA and Christie's have used the technology for their events.

More about Teams and NDI:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/broadcasting-audio-and-video-from-teams-with-ndi-and-sdi-technology-e91a0adb-96b9-4dca-a2cd-07181276afa3

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/use-ndi-in-meetings

Transcript

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Tom Arbuthnot 0:01

Hi everybody. Welcome to the second Microsoft Teams Insider podcast. Got a great guest today, a long-term friend in the community, and been at Microsoft, I think 12 years, maybe more now. Aaron Steele Hey Aaron, do you wanna just introduce yourself? Just a little bit of background.

Aaron Steele 0:15

Thanks Tom. So yeah, as you mentioned, I've been here at Microsoft now for about 12 years. I've started off in our consulting org where I was helping our customers to implement some of our on-prem products from the sort of exchange and Skype for Business and Lync days. I came from a consulting background prior to that, so it was an easy transition into Microsoft in that space. And then I moved into some more pre-sales roles, and then I've spent about the past five or six years working in some of our customer engineering teams where I'm a little more there to help our customers understand things. But living in our engineering role, and then earlier in 2022, I've changed roles into a deeper level of engineering. I'm now what is called a technical program manager inside of engineering and in Microsoft. We mix that technical program manager as somebody who is a bridge in between engineering and product. So when things get super complex or get too gnarly for that bridge to be just a natural thing. Yeah. Or we have lots of different teams we need to work with or we need to dig into the weeds about something really strange or new, that's where I get to play.

Tom Arbuthnot 1:33

Yeah. And it's super, super interesting that role. I'm always glad when people have come from field and working with customers to that kind of role. Cause you've got a sense of the real world and the customer challenges and getting anything done in a product as big as teams. And because of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, you end up working with. Lots of different groups, don't you? To get anything done is it touches multiple technology groups.

Aaron Steele 1:53

Yeah, exactly. So I get to play with everything from our identity folks to our backend teams who are building new services to our client folks, to our events team, to our media team, and our folks who are dealing with the video cameras and mic issues. Everything in between because, hey, We've got these technologies around. Everything from, as you know, NDI RTMP, we've got all these different sort of worlds that we are working to make sure that our event producers and event teams can work with, and that's really my job to make sure they can do theirs.

Tom Arbuthnot 2:31

Yeah. And I wanted to dive into that in particular. So the NDI and the RTMP stuff, can we start at a very basic level? Cause I it's not, I don't think it's super well understood and it's a niche of a niche, right? Yeah. So what is NDI and what's this use case?

Aaron Steele 2:44

Yeah, so NDI I is a network device interface. That's the name of it. It is a, an uplift from the older technology called SDI which SDI is a big player in the video production space, all based on your old technology, BNC cables, but point to point physical connection of a BNC cable routing video at a high quality from one device to another. We transitioned that to this technology called NDI which does the same thing, but inside of a non routed local area network, right? So it does all those same things, but now uplifts it from those physical connections. Yeah, do a little more of a virtual device connection in that networked land space.

Tom Arbuthnot 3:30

Yeah, so it's land, it's cat, it's rooting, but it's not, or it's rooting on a local land, but it's not,

Aaron Steele 3:35

yeah, not rooting, technically rooting. Exactly. Yeah. You can do some stuff traveling. I should

Tom Arbuthnot 3:40

use the right word, isn't it? Rooting is the wrong word. It's not crossing sub nets,

Aaron Steele 3:43

Exactly. You can technically fudge it and get it to route across subnets but you most of the time don't want to because in fact, if you start talking NDI on a local LAN with customers, the first words outta your mouth are gonna be 10 gigabit,

Tom Arbuthnot 3:59

right? Yeah. That's some healthy bandwidth

Aaron Steele 4:02

right? Because on that NDI stream, because they're coming from that world of SDI compressing, it isn't gonna be happening, right? Because we want the raw 1080p 30 frame per second video at the other end. We're talking a hundred megabit per stream is not out of the ordinary.

Tom Arbuthnot 4:24

So we're talking about these streams coming from cameras. Yeah. This is for higher end production, so like TV studio, film, crew, like sports events where there's, there might be like 20 cameras covering a sports event and you need to be mixing and flipping. And the, when you see the big TV studios where they're like camera three, camera six, camera nine is that kind tech right.

Aaron Steele 4:43

That is exactly what it's for. And what NDI enables for you as a person who's doing this in your team's meetings is pulling out those individual video feeds from the people in that meeting as unique sources onto your local switching network for those video switchers in your existing production plant to then interact the way they would any other thing.

Tom Arbuthnot 5:09

Yeah. And so this is it used to be Skype broadcast, wasn't it? You'd see Skype, TX technicallly All right, cool. So you'd see like any news network, like they, they'd see, they'd have, someone in from the field or a subject matter expert. Expert

Aaron Steele 5:22

and a little Skype logo on the top.

Tom Arbuthnot 5:24

A nice bit of branding there. Yeah. So, were they on a regular Skype client or a special Skype client in that scenario?

Aaron Steele 5:30

So the end user joining into that was on a regular Skype client. The device inside of the broadcast plant was a special purpose-built device in their rack system called a Skype tx. It was a purpose-built,

Tom Arbuthnot 5:43

so they had to buy, they had to buy some meaty hardware to make this happen.

Aaron Steele 5:47

They bought that thing and it was really just that purpose-built black box device called a tx and they plugged their regular, in their cases, SDI cable into that, and that's what they were getting that video out.

Tom Arbuthnot 5:59

All right. But where we are now with NDI in teams, they don't, they can do that all virtually. Is that right? Or without hardware?

Aaron Steele 6:06

Both. So in fact, part of what we've enabled is that same thing with hardware out now. So it's not just NDI when we're talking about it now, ndi I was our first release where it was much more a teams client on that local land via its land connection into whatever else you wanted to deal with it. Now with the world of working with AJA and Black Magic devices. we've released hardware out in the same vein so I can have my same thing. It's running a teams client joined to that same meeting, but now I've got an SDI cable coming out of it that's doing that same exact thing, it's for the world of those producers and those TV studios who have a huge. Inbuilt infrastructure of SDI yeah. And don't necessarily want to upgrade it. In fact, for broadcasters, we've really got three products in this space. If you think about it, we've got NDI NDI I is much more for your sort of newer, I'm going to build it out from scratch today, world. The people who maybe come from a world of Twitch and game streaming type things.

Tom Arbuthnot 7:24

So like New World would like internet first.

Aaron Steele 7:27

Exactly. That's your NDI player. Your SDI player is I come from the world of broadcast. I have an SDI plant. I have those infrastructures. I've got miles upon miles of BNC cable rolling around my plant yeah, fine. We'll do hardware out. The third case is the broadcast development kit or BDK cuz that BDK is much more for a cloud first production studio who have moved to, we don't have everybody in one location, but what we have is, I've got some people on the West Coast, some people on the East Coast, some people in Europe, some people in. And they're all producing. And I want them all to be able to get stuff in and out of the same system and switch videos across all of that regardless of where they are. And I don't need my producers in the same room with my infrastructure.

Tom Arbuthnot 8:20

And that BDK is, is templated VMs and Azure,

Aaron Steele 8:24

how's that exactly how it works exactly. It's basically a script and a set of processes to get you a set of VMs built up in Azure that you can then plug a meeting into. Once that meeting is bound into it, you're getting individual feeds out and you can pipe those into your other cloud-ready production studio infrastructure

Tom Arbuthnot 8:45

And that, that individual feed is really important, isn't it? So you are bringing people, you're bringing multiple people into a teams meeting. You are not getting the muxed feed you're getting the individual. So you can choose your layout, you can choose who you cut to. That's your.

Aaron Steele 8:58

That is, in fact, the second thing we added in the NDI was unique audio feeds or isolated audio for NDI i, right? Because yes, there is this meeting feed you're in a meeting if you capture the meeting audio. You're gonna get everybody's audio, regardless of who's on video. With that isolated audio feed. Now, if I capture Tom's video, I'm capturing Tom's audio only. and not the meeting audio. If Erin talks, I don't get

Tom Arbuthnot 9:28

that.

Aaron Steele 9:28

And it's way better than me having have my producer. Also sitting there watching the teams meeting unmuting and muting people as the different people talk. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot 9:40

The lag and the Yeah, the trickiness. Yeah. That makes sense. So you shared with me before, there's some really cool customers you guys have worked with and this is scaled up to you. Got any examples

Aaron Steele 9:49

you can share? Yeah, no, definitely. The marquee one that a lot of people will remember is the, so we worked with the N NBA using this NDI technology really early on in the pandemic when they built out a bubble down in Florida. So they built out a bubble where they had three basketball courts. They had decided that they would have 80 some odd games across the top 15 teams or whatever it was. Over the course of the next few months, they would play five or six games a night across these teams. Give people, give teams. Like you'd play a night, you'd get a day off, you'd play the next day, you'd get a day off.

Tom Arbuthnot 10:28

Yeah. So while you're in the bubble, make the most of you basically.

Aaron Steele 10:30

Exactly. So they were, yeah, six days a week or so. They were running games, five and six games a day across these three courts. But they didn't just want to be playing in front of nobody. So they built up a set of huge, and I want to say they were about three meter by six meter screens, 10 of those eight across one side and one on each end. And into those, we used a combination of NDI plus our together mode scenes. Yeah. To bring in audience members who are joined into regular, old teams meeting. Who could then be fans in the stands and we were piping those same people, the actual game feed in near real time. That so cool we got that latency. And I will tell you this was what made it really just a functional experience was the latency. We were able to get round trip court to attendee to video back on the. was less than two seconds. Yeah. Yeah. And it made it so that the players. could interact with the audience in a way, almost like they were there and it really was. They could wave to an audience member. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot 11:57

And people wave back, react when the hoop rather than, yeah. Cause it would be really off-putting if there was any more lag than that. Cause it'd be like we just scored, nobody reacted. And then five seconds later everybody's eh,

Aaron Steele 12:07

Exactly. So that latency was key. And NDI. Part of what gave us that NDI plus the power of the NBA to end their network

Tom Arbuthnot 12:17

Yeah. I imagine they've got some network. Yeah, they do. So that's very high end. Is this technology restricted to high end?

Aaron Steele 12:24

No, not at all. This is a thing where, what it enables is that video producer to get a more. personalized or complex experience out of a teams meeting to an event. It may be hosted in the teams experience for a live event or maybe even hosted somewhere else, but no, it's not restricted to super high end. Yes, there is a barrier to entry cuz you can't do this on really old. because it does require processing power. If you just try to throw a really old PC at there to suck out video, it's not gonna come up great.

Tom Arbuthnot 13:01

Yeah. And do I say I as an individual or a smaller company want to do I need to run that? BDK kit to get the streams, or can I just do it direct to OBS or something like that? Yeah, no, so that's the other power of this is there's all these free, and low cost options. Again, coming from the world of streaming and those people who do game streaming, like the open Broadcast studio or OBS as you mentioned it's the thing that enables me without any Azure, without anything else. I got a teams license and I turn on NDI in my tenant, and I can have video on my local LAN and I can switch it up with OBS, put captions, put whatever I want, put lower thirds plus put video transitions, have really complex scenes where I put Tom's video up high and I have the presentation low and do the things that we are just now putting out in PowerPoint into your. Yeah. Off topic slightly, but OBS is just amazing, the fact it's free and out there. Anytime you see people doing fancy things with video streaming, I think nine times outta 10 they've got OBS or whenever I join a meeting and I see the kind of blue Ninja star placeholder, I'm like, oh, another OBS user.

Aaron Steele 14:10

Yeah, exactly. It's one of those enabling technologies. NDI is just that enabling based technology that lets. take a meeting experience to the next level. And then you mentioned RTMP or we mentioned RTMP yeah. RTMP is really the other side of that same equation. It's the realtime media protocol. We call it real time, but it's not real time. It's 15 to 30 seconds delayed. But it is the technology underlying the vast majority of streaming video on the internet. Anybody who is doing. YouTube Live, Twitch Facebook Live, any of those things, they're taking that OBS or other encoder device and connecting it up so that then the power of the content delivery network from your YouTube or your Twitch twitcher, your whatever, is taking that video and distributing it to all the attendees.

Tom Arbuthnot 15:16

So is this the scenario where we're getting into where you could have a teams meeting push out to, like a LinkedIn Live type scenario?

Aaron Steele 15:22

Yep. Yep. Where you can take a teams meeting and suck those videos out into yeah. LinkedIn live or on the other side, you can take some other source of video. be it a teams meeting, be it multi-camera setups on a local network, be it any number of things. Mix them up in something like o Bs or vMix and stream them into a live event,

Tom Arbuthnot 15:50

Right? Yep. Yes. I work with a a fashion retailer. They do like a. Big like launch shows, internal launch shows in London, and they push that back into live events to have people around the world watch the internal show. That kind of thing.

Aaron Steele 16:05

Exactly. So it's that same as I say, enabling technology, but now it's letting me get a more complex production than the stock live events experience into all my attendees in the live events, and really just letting live events do the content delivery. versus the f the full production.

Tom Arbuthnot 16:26

Yeah, the kind of producing, the mixing, everything else. You just send one, you deal with the stream and you use the power of Microsoft's of CDN and reach,

Aaron Steele 16:33

Yeah, not the production capabilities directly in that. Yeah. So that's what I get to play with right now. We've we acquired a company, we called them Stream. That happened a number of years ago.

Tom Arbuthnot 16:44

Talk us through Yeah. What you're doing now. Cause it's quite interesting.. Stream being the like corporate YouTube, I'm sure that's not the Microsoft marketing term, but that's the kind of product, isn't it?

Aaron Steele 16:52

Yes. Yeah. It's some level, it's the corporate VOD right? The corporate video store for content of a video type inside of your network. As I say, it was a company we acquired. We called them Stream. We put 'em into the Office 365 bundle, and then back in 2022, we announced a transition that was coming for that to move a lot of that VOD technology into SharePoint.

Tom Arbuthnot 17:20

And this is where for context, we were listening. So your teams meeting recordings previously would've turned up in stream. That was where you went. When you pressed to go to the link, it would go to Stream and that would, and they would actually be in stream as a service

Aaron Steele 17:33

In stream itself. stream.microsoft.com. Yeah. Now those things are transitioning, to stream modern. We call that stream on SharePoint. Part of that transition is finally we've announced some, two years later the end of life for those stream products. And part of that is we've released into public preview and are very shortly here gonna release our version of the newer encoder services that Stream used to provide for live events. All right, so when people used to, or today, if you go to schedule a live event, you'll see that you get production via teams or production via an external encoder. That was, those external encoders were what was connecting to by stream. Yeah. In public preview, as I said, and moving to full GA release here very soon will be a teams version of that provides the same capabilities and the same support, the same networking, the same, all those things, but pushing to a newer stack on newer code that will let us innovate more.

Tom Arbuthnot 18:40

And that'll be the last piece of the stream puzzle. So the modern stream is essentially SharePoint holding the video files, if I'm understanding it right. And the, then the encoder stuff will go into the teams org looking after that bit

Aaron Steele 18:51

Exactly. And that finishes that sort of little piece, and it gives us that platform on which to build, to increase things like video quality and bandwidth and do all the work that we've been trying to do and move it into the meeting stack and do all these other things to give you some of these capabilities that had been very locked away in that event. In other places.

Tom Arbuthnot 19:18

It's interesting how these worlds are blurring, aren't they? Between what is a internal meeting versus a webinar versus an event versus virtual appointment versus live event. Like the line is blurring and I feel like there's a really good opportunity for enterprises and organizations to up their standard of production without spending tens of thousands of pounds. Cuz quite often what is the, or certainly why I. Is, key events like Causley events, they'll get external production teams in, they'll spend a lot of money. And then the rest of it is just a regular teams meeting and there's this middle ground where with just a bit of investment and a bit of tech, they can suddenly up the standards quite a lot. I think.

Aaron Steele 19:57

Totally. It's a little bit of investment, a little bit of people, right? Yeah. And a little bit of process. And you get something out of it that is a really. I don't wanna say complex, but a really quality experience that looks like it's worth more than it really was. Yeah, Just managing layouts and doing lower thirds and stuff like that. There's a mental perception there when it feels produced as opposed to a teams meeting. There's a difference. And I think some of those things can be quite subtle as well, but they You do feel them. Yeah, so that's where we're taking this, and it's a fun place to be, right? 12 years in and I get to do. stuff like this. I get to talk to fun people. I get to, we, we mentioned the NBA but then last year and a half ago, I got to talk to Christie's to help them do an auction. All based on teams and those things, virtual experiences.

Tom Arbuthnot 20:52

I do feel you get to work with some of the the more fun and interesting customers and just interesting use case also. But I. Very important to them. Use cases. So there's no, you don't wanna mess up with the NBA or Christie's

Aaron Steele 21:04

No, that's, that is definitely a case where those are the people who, as much as we want to say every meeting is important

Tom Arbuthnot 21:12

yes. they're important and as important,

Aaron Steele 21:15

Exactly.. Yeah, it's, getting to. Big broadcasters in Brazil, right? Getting to work with just the number of customers, doing them. These interesting production things, again, based on these really core enabling technologies of meeting plus NDI plus RTMP and a little bit of people in process, and you get this amazing product out in the end. It's just something that I can hang my hat on and say I was part of that.

Tom Arbuthnot 21:44

And this, am I right in saying there's no additional licensing around this either, so it's another one of those do more with less scenarios. You've already got this in the box. It's just understanding how it works.

Aaron Steele 21:53

Exactly. This is, right now it's core to that E three E five license just comes with it. As long as you got a tenant, you can provision it with those licenses.

Tom Arbuthnot 22:03

Nice. So how do people get started? We had, we shared a couple of links in chat beforehand, so I'll put those links in, in the show notes. So a docs link and a support link. Is that, is there anything else they should do to get started it?

Aaron Steele 22:14

So the docs link will walk you through the basics of turning on the policy and getting those things configured. And then the support link gives you a little more detail around some of those things. But it's. you turn the policy on the user goes into their team settings and hits permissions and turns on NDI and now you've got this machine where when it joins to a meeting, it's spitting out these video feeds. Right. It is mind blowing at some level, but it is that simple. That's why there aren't a ton of docs about it, It is really just that very basic. I turn it on and it starts sending out video.

Tom Arbuthnot 22:56

Yeah. Now you go capture it. What do you wanna do with that feed, basically is exactly, that's where the world explodes into a million options, right? Because But then that's the o bs or that's the proper production value or whatever. You've whatever kit you've got to capture,

Aaron Steele 23:08

Exactly. That's your OBS, your vMix, your heck, AWS Elemental. You could. a hundred thousand dollars on your gear to pull that stuff out. And it's still just you pointing a teams client at a video series. Yeah,

Tom Arbuthnot 23:25

That's awesome. Cool. Are all right. Anything else you want to talk about? Anything about where things are going or what's coming? I know you have be careful on the NDA stuff, so don't get yourself in trouble.

Aaron Steele 23:34

I we touched on it, right where we're going generically is that unification space, right? You said we're blurring that line and that's really directionally where we've been shooting for a while, and where I know my team is pushing really hard to get to is, and we've got a job ahead of us. Cause we could create a level of confus. but we think that. We don't want to create that confusion, but we really do want to just enable people to have the type of meeting they need to have with the experience they want without needing to be worried about, is this a meeting we're streaming or a meeting we're not. Do I have to call it a live event question? And that's.

Tom Arbuthnot 24:22

That is where we are today. To be fair, it's if I want to do this, it's a live event. If I want to do this, it's a webinar. If I want to do this, it's a meeting right now there are some decisions to be made. I'd love to see that become more, more fluid. That'd be amazing.

Aaron Steele 24:34

We again, we've gotta figure out the right way to present that to the end user to help guide them through the choices they want to make. Yeah. But not make those decisions be a hard end. Sort of choices, right? I want to give you a choose your own adventure to get you to an experience you desire, but I don't want to make that such that if you pick the wrong choice, you end up in something that locks you into that or puts you into a bad experience, or doesn't let you change your mind later.

Tom Arbuthnot 25:09

Yeah. Yeah. It's quite a challenge when you think about the proliferation of options and like you say giving the power without giving the confusion is a tightrope.

Aaron Steele 25:18

Exactly. So that really is the tightrope that my team is very focused on really finishing is walking that to get to an experience that's great for everybody and doesn't. Mess people's experience up right? Yeah. As coming from a Skype for Business to Teams transition, people are afraid of change. But yeah, change is what's gonna come. Cuz as you've noted, it's a complex choice today that ends up in some really concrete decisions based on those choices you make. And if you have to change your mind later on, look, I scheduled a webinar and guess what? All of a sudden I need to stream that webinar out cuz a lot more people registered than I expected. Oh crap. I have to change it and cancel it and reschedule it now. Yeah. And that just doesn't look right to anybody.

Tom Arbuthnot 26:10

Yeah. It's confusing. And the typical organizer wouldn't even know why they've made those choices,

Aaron Steele 26:16

Exactly. So if we can give you something where you say, I want to have a webinar and just natively out of that experience, if by chance, 12,000 people register for your webinar, great. Hold your webinar and. The first few people who join get some level of interactivity. And when people raise their hands, we bring 'em in, they can interact, and everybody else is just watching a streaming experience. And you, the producer, don't really care.

Tom Arbuthnot 26:41

Sounds like a great world to be in. I look forward to you bringing this imminently. Aaron, I'm gonna put you on the spot. I didn't prep you for this, but we're looking to talk to more people, like you that are in the weeds, the teams insiders. Who else would you recommend we have on the podcast?

Aaron Steele 26:54

Geez. So you've got our friends who are doing some of this stuff for Comms V next, right? So the people who are putting on comms V next Yeah. Who live in this world of event production using teams. Nice. And the same for Mark and the, and his Commsverse, right? Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot 27:15

So got Pat Richards and Mark on talk about event production. That's a really good shout.

Aaron Steele 27:20

Yeah. Cuz they would bring this perspective of, look we are teams first and we people in person who are doing this. But we still want that team's experience.

Tom Arbuthnot 27:32

Yeah, I've talked to pat a bit about his rig and his kit there for CommsvNext it's pretty cool. That's a really good idea. Them as well as you're, you're familiar with my friend Brian. Brian. Nice. He might be somebody who come talk to you about some pieces of it, cuz he's still living in that engineering customer first space, whereas I've moved much deeper into. engineering ship stuff first. Yeah. Brian's a good shout Okay, Brian, I'm coming in for you as well, okay. Sounds like a plan. Thanks for the time Aaron. I really appreciate you getting to the weeds on that. There's just not enough information out there about all that stuff and it's such powerful technology. So I appreciate you giving us the insight.

Aaron Steele 28:08

Not a problem at all, Tom. Good to talk to you fore sure.

Tom Arbuthnot 28:10

Great. And if people wanna find you or do you wanna be found?

Aaron Steele 28:14

So I've actually, you can find me, if you wanna set up a meeting with me, I can do those ak ms slash find Aaron. But, I may decline it I've really moved off of the socials for the most part. You can follow me on baking steel on Instagram, but really all you see there is me posting pictures of my dog and the food I make.

Tom Arbuthnot 28:32

Awesome. I appreciate Aaron and thanks for being around to answer questions and help out. I really appreciate it. Of course. Have a great one. Cheers. Bye

Aaron Steele 28:39

bye.