Teams Insider

Multicam and Multistream video with Logitech's Henry Levak

Henry Levak, VP of Product at Logitech for Business, talks through the thinking behind the award-winning Logitech Sight centre-of-table camera, how multi-camera and multistream will work with Teams Rooms on Windows, and the company's move into workplace experience software including auto book/auto r

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners and AV/UC professionals planning meeting room refreshes, particularly anyone evaluating centre-of-table cameras, multistream on Teams Rooms on Windows, or software approaches to room and desk booking and ghost meetings.

Guest: Henry Levak — Vice President of Product, Logitech for Business, Logitech

Many thanks to Logitech, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Sight began as a pre-COVID research project. Early prototypes clustered several cameras at the front of the room and the team found the perspective barely changed — image quality improved but the viewing angle did not, which pushed them to a front-plus-centre-of-room combination instead. ▶ 2:02
Legacy multi-camera switching was audio-based, which Levak calls good but fragile. Sight fuses video and audio so a participant who has recently spoken can still be tracked while walking around the room in silence; context cues such as head nods, smiles and eye rolls are on the roadmap. ▶ 4:05
Levak's argument for multistream: the people in the room currently decide how remote attendees see them. "If I was working from home, you wouldn't order my lunch for me... but for some reason you're choosing my camera mode." The aim is to hand every remote participant their own choice of speaker or presenter view. ▶ 5:35
Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini will deliver multiple simultaneous streams to Teams Rooms on Windows via a software update — no hardware change — with the capability already demonstrated at InfoComm. ▶ 6:36
Combining Sight with Rally Bar in multistream (multi-camera, multi-angle, multi-stream together) is planned as a quick follow-up after the initial multistream release, alongside name tags. ▶ 7:06
Daisy-chaining two Sight units to cover larger rooms was the most requested piece of feedback; the extra port underneath Sight was built in for this, and Levak has already seen two units working together in a live demo. The units negotiate between themselves like Logitech mic pods do for audio. ▶ 7:37
Auto book and auto release ships as a software update to Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini, using in-room presence detection and talking directly to Exchange rather than creating a separate booking source of truth. IT sets the release timer, and after a configured number of no-shows the whole recurring series is released to kill ghost meetings. It works with Teams Rooms on Windows or Android. ▶ 12:11
Licensing split: most device management sits in the free basic Sync plan, while remote UI access and the calendar/Exchange integration features require Logitech Essential (advanced tooling) or Select (which adds 24/7 dedicated support). ▶ 16:19
Insights and analytics is the next big theme for Levak's team — moving beyond booking and automation to reporting on how, when and by whom spaces and devices are actually used. ▶ 17:19