What are the benefits to Live Topics?

[Heather Marrs]

Good day!

First a little background - I work for a small software company. We just launched a user group with all of our users and set up a community site for the group. We also launched a monthly webinar training series. I know that our site allows for live topics and I'm very interested in that. Also please note that I have basically no knowledge in live streaming and the regular meeting series with lots of people is still very new for us. 
Now for my question - We currently use Google Meet for our monthly webinars and this is working well. We thought about setting up the live topic but we realized that the Google plan we have does not allow us to do live streaming and it will cost us an additional $4k per year to upgrade to a plan that includes it. 

Currently, we are creating a forum page for each month's training and then uploading the Google Meet recording link to that forum. 
For those that have used live topics, what is the benefit other than it automatically creates a forum and keeps the chat history? Does it make sense for us to find another solution to make live streaming work? 
Just really curious about feedback on the live topics feature from others that use it. 
Thanks for your help!
(not sure if this is the right forum for this topic?!) 

Edited April 26 by Heather Marrs

[Jim M]

2 hours ago, Heather Marrs said:

For those that have used live topics, what is the benefit other than it automatically creates a forum and keeps the chat history?

I will let actual users state their experiences and benefits. However, the idea of the live topic is that you can have your live event with people asking questions, leaving comments, etc... Then have it transferred to a forum topic, have everyone see those questions/comments/etc... that happened live and continue right along without missing a beat.

We use it in our monthly webinars about releases and upcoming items. It's been pretty successful in that right to see comments build from live to recorded webinar.

2 hours ago, Heather Marrs said:

Does it make sense for us to find another solution to make live streaming work? 

We use Zoom which casts live to YouTube, if that helps any.