Centralized streaming platform for company video-streams/events

Question

We have a weekly meeting in the company. It's moderated by a designated group of people. Every week the moderator changes.

Pre-covid times were fairly easy. The moderator could just speak freely in a conference room. There were microphones, speakers, cameras, etc. already set up. However, of course, nowadays, moderation takes place from home. That forced us to install a whole bunch of software (ECamm live, OBS, Loopback ...) on the moderator's clients and utilize the streaming capabilities of MS Teams.

Well, as we all know, these "temporary" solutions more and more grew to be persistent. This led to annoying issues. Like inconsistent Teams versioning across platforms. A moderator having Linux on their clients can not take part, cause the Teams app is so much behind. Or the recent changes in the MacOS system where you can not use a virtual camera anymore conveniently.

Is there a solution where we can set up such a remote streaming platform centralized? In a way that the moderators can platform-independently sign into a "server" of some kind and pass on their microphone and video stream? Everything else is then just provided & configured on this central platform.

Answer 1

Short answer: No!

Longer answer follows...:

realtime audio/video conferencing inherently requires local efficient processing (in addition to sufficient bandwidth and other factors).

A remote service can try detect users running inefficient tools, and can then either ban them or try masquerade the problem, but cannot really fix it: Truly fixing the problem would require the remote service having power over the local system, which is how virus spread so generally not safe to do.

Masquerading the problem often means bypassing system-installed tools and using alternative ones, but that is rarely the most efficient: The local system knows best what it can do most optimally.