Happy to share with you my experience on providing online video lectures for large auditorium (100+ students). I have tried several free and paid solutions already widely known on the market of videoconferencing: Zoom, Google Meet, etc. And finally I finished my research on Telegram.
What are the requirements? First of all, I need to provide video lecture simultaniously with PowerPoint presentation and all without weird additional software and setup - different webinar software does not meet this one. Second, students should turn their video on and to be able to communicate with voice and video - YouTube, Twich and others unidirectional video solutions do not satisfy it.
That's why I finally came to video conferencing tools. Pros and Cons of them:
3rd place. Zoom.
+ Easy to use.
- Limit to 40 min on free plan, $15/mo paid plan is limited to 100 persons in one conference.
2nd place. Google Meet.
+ Easy to use. No limits on time.
- Limited to 100 participants.
1st place - our winner: Telegram.
+ Videoconfence is limited to 1000 participants - I have only 120-140 students :).
And one more big advantage of Telegram: between the lectures the community continues it's life. We discuss some questions with the students, and watch lectures in the same place. There is no need of additional software for discussions (like Discord, or.. Telegram itself, which was used alongside with Google Meet).
The video quality is very good.
And it is free.