[CorpOverreach]

It's useful.

It's more of a large-scale broadcast situation. Think of large corporate town halls, town council meetings, etc.

[Gasp0de]

You can just have a conference call with the 5-10 speakers and use broadcasting software to stream it to the audience, why do they need to be in the conference?

[dcow]

Why setup a separate broadcast when listeners can just join the meeting room?

[pclmulqdq]

Live Q&A is a nice feature.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

For the Q&A section that comes at the end, usually.

[hot_gril]

Zoom has a mode that basically does this for you, which I assume is how they support >500 users.

[barbazoo]

At some point though why not just collect questions beforehand, record the whole thing and let people watch it on their own time. At that scale there'll be no interactivity during the meeting anyway.

[max51]

Because that's how you end up with projects that take 3 years to plan instead of 3 months. A live Q&A where all of the experts who can answer questions and everyone interested in the subject who may have questions are in the same room (live or virtual) is a lot more productive compared to what you are suggesting.

If something they said in the main presentation was missing important details that you need to do you work, why do you need to wait days/weeks for them to gather all the questions, find all the answers, and publish a video, when they could just answer it live in a few seconds?!

[ebiester]

You'd be surprised how much chat happens as a side channel. Further, collecting questions means that the presentation material would have to be out there first, and that misses the point of the town halls, where financials and other initiatives are often first presented to the larger organization.