Online conference broadcast using broadcast component

An online conferencing system that provides an automatic mechanism to broadcast an online conference. A video gathering component gathers video streams for each of at least some of the current participants in the online conference. A broadcast start triggering component allows one or more of the participants to trigger operation of a broadcasting component. The broadcast component that, when triggered, causes a resulting video stream comprising at least a composite of at least some of the gathered video streams to be published to a plurality of viewers. In some embodiments, pre-processing of the video streams to create the resulting video stream also occurs. Such pre-processing could include, for instance, composing a stream from multiple video streams, altering one or more of the video streams, applying augmented reality to the video stream, and so forth.