Feature request: Spectator mode

#1

A channel property to participants enter without emitting audio/video but only watching the others they do.

This could open the possibility to many people assist to a few orators debate or “classroom mode”.

The new property could set different level restriction values:
0 = Only participant mode
1 = Participant mode by default
2 = Spectator mode by default
3 = Only spectator mode but authorised users (my room moderator)

Another improvement will be saving lots of bandwidth and CPU.

4 Likes
Is there a way to invite people as "spectators" (only to see the meeting)?
Question about Performance and number of users per session
#2

This would basically be a build-in streaming-mode which would be elegant and easy to use.

My use case are university lectures. There are hundreds of listeners but very few ever want to say or show something. Streaming a Meeting to YouTube is possible but makes it hard for individuals to become an active participant if they want to.

This sounds like a good idea to scale up to more users than otherwise possible.

My wishlist for this feature would be:

  • spectators can knock/raise hand and a moderator can give them participant status
  • by default everyone can use the chat (can be restricted for public streams)
  • as this would need the server to create a video-stream to send it to spectators, this would mean server-side-recording would be solved too.

For a good setup how to build a relatively well integrated Jisti-Streaming-Event, check out the Matrix Blog.

1 Like
#3

Chat permissions has just made me to think in more fine grained feature:

  • Video: Levels 0, 1, 2, 3
  • Audio: Levels 0, 1, 2, 3
  • Chat: Levels 0, 1, 2, 3

(participant forced, participant default, spectator default, spectator forced)

Also, users without video permissions they should not be using room page space with a thumbnail (being listed in a margin should be enough).