Skype for Business Broadcast — Screen sharing

Sonia Cuff
REgarding 365

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I was asked to present at a meetup event to demo Power BI’s integration with Xero. Because it’s an on screen demo, it translated very well to broadcasting and recording, for people who couldn’t attend in person in Brisbane. I was also keen to try out Skype for Business Broadcast.

Then I discovered that Skype for Business Broadcast does not support screen sharing. Nope. Natively you can push video and/or a PowerPoint slide deck, but not share your screen.

One workaround is to use a program called XSplit Broadcaster which creates a virtual web camera. You can then tell XSplit to record the desktop and tell Skype for Business Broadcast to take the video from the XSplit camera.

The free version of XSplit works, but it does leaves a small white opaque watermark that you will see visible in bottom right hand corner of the recording. It’s more noticeable when your demo has a dark background.

XSplit Broadcaster watermark with free version

The Steps:

I ran my laptop screen at 1920 x 720 resolution and set Xsplit to the same.

Then I set my video device in Skype for Business to be the Xsplit camera, before starting the Skype for Business Broadcast.

My Surface Book (i7 with 16GB RAM) was powerful enough to handle it all, but a lower specced machine would struggle.

For audio, I just had my Blue Yeti microphone plugged into the Surface Book.

(If you are completely new to Skype for Business Broadcast, scheduling a new broadcast and starting it is all done from the website https://broadcast.skype.com Here you can set some options including if you want a recording to be available after the event (at the same meeting URL) and if you also want a downloadable file of the video to be made, for the organiser).

The Result:

That was ok for a presentation that was mainly a demo, as the speakers were somewhat tied to the laptop anyway. But for the in-room audience it hid the speaker the podium and for the online audience the volume faded away if they walked away.

I also noticed something weird in the recording where the sound would sometimes stop for a split second and then come on louder, before normalising. Not sure what glitch that was, but post-editing in Camtasia helped a little. I need to play to investigate that one further. It may have been the laptop maxxing out trying to do all the things.

And I learnt that if your microphone is muted, starting the Skype For Business Broadcast does not automatically unmute your mic! Rookie mistake, but one I won’t make again.

Watch out for ancient venue projectors!

One heart stopping moment occurred when I went to start Xsplit on my laptop at the venue and it stopped with an error. It worked at home!

At the venue, I had my Surface Book plugged into the AV system’s projector. Tried via HDMI and VGA and it was a no go for both. Xsplit was not happy with the venue’s projector.

So to fool it, I rebooted my laptop, started Xsplit first (successfully) and then connected the projector. Worked perfectly!

Here is the session recording

DISCLAIMER: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft, XSplit or Camtasia

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Cloud Ops Advocate at Microsoft. Technology lover, small business champion, Azure Cloud hugger, IT Operations. Brisbane, Australia http://soniacuff.com