UPDATE: In November 2018, Microsoft will begin rolling out new Microsoft Stream capabilities for Enterprise E1, Enterprise E3, Firstline F1, Education A1, Education A3, Business Premium, Business Essentials, and Microsoft 365 Office 365 plans. New features include:

• Speaker timelines with facial detection. Allows viewers to easily jump to all points in a video where a specific person appears.
•  Speech-to-text and closed-captioning. Captures video content in a readable form.
• Transcript search and timecodes. Enable viewers to quickly search and find the content they need.

Speech-to-text transcription, closed-captioning, and deep search will also be applied to all existing Stream videos.

Original post:

This week I’ve had the privilege to attend and speak at the 2018 SharePoint Conference. The conference has been amazing–great content, a fun venue, and fantastic speakers and attendees.

One of the sessions I’ve been looking forward to attending centers on Stream, including an overview of the app, a demo of its Office 365 integration, and migration paths from Office 365 Video. Check out my “pseudo” live blog of the session below. (I call it a “pseudo” live blog because I’m posting the recap in its entirety at the end of the session.)

Leverage Intelligent Video to Power a Collaborative Organization with Microsoft Stream

• “Video is becoming ubiquitous in our personal and work lives”
• As humans, we can process video 60,000 times faster than text (Liraz Margalit, Ph.D)
• Key scenarios for use of video in organizations:
  • Executive communications
  • Training
  • Onboarding
  • Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing (usage is increasing due to the ease of creating video content. Subject matter experts are increasingly leveraging video to share what they know with others)
• Stream is an enterprise video service; a destination where all the videos in your organization can be stored and discovered
• The Stream homepage includes:
  • Trending videos
  • Spotlight videos (aka videos that have been “pinned” to appear by a Stream administrator)
  • Stream video watchlist
  • List of Stream channels I’ve followed
• PowerPoint can be used as your video creation tool. The PowerPoint Recording tab enables you to create your recording. The Publish to Stream button converts your PowerPoint video into an MP4 file and automatically uploads it to Stream
• All videos in Stream are automatically closed-captioned if the video is labeled as English or Spanish
• Full-scale video transcripts are created for E5 customers. The transcripts are displayed alongside the Stream video, are editable by the video owner and allow users to jump to any point of video by clicking on the transcript. (Note: Only videos in English and Spanish are automatically transcribed).
• E5 customers also have a People tab that appears under each Stream video. A picture of each person featured in the Stream video is shown. Click on a picture to jump to the point of the video where they are featured
• Video analytics and REST APIs are not yet available in Stream
• Stream videos are not available for searching in Delve at this time
• Upload limit for a single Stream video is 50GB

Office 365 integration:

• Stream supports Office 365 groups. Channels can be leveraged within an Office 365 group to segment videos by need/subject/audience
• Each Office 365 group gets a unique landing page in Stream. This allows for highlighting of group videos
• A Stream web part is available for SharePoint Online. The web part can be used to share a single Stream video or an entire Stream channel. All videos are played directly within the SharePoint Online page
• Stream tabs can also be created in Teams. The Stream tab can display individual Stream videos or entire Stream channels
• Yammer integration is also available
• The goal is to continue evolving Stream integration into other Office 365 products

Stream administration:

• All Office 365 global admins are Stream admins by default. You can also denote other individuals to be Stream admins
• Stream admins can:
  • Set spotlight videos (aka videos that will be tagged to display on the Stream homepage carousel)
  • Configure a Stream video upload policy. Once defined, the policy will pop-up when a new user uploads a Stream video. The policy must be read and accepted before the user can continue
  • View storage consumption. Default Stream storage is 500GB, plus 0.5GB of storage per user. Additional storage can be purchased
  • Restrict the use of comments on videos. Individual video owners can restrict comments for their videos even if Stream comments are turned on by default
  • Restrict who can upload videos and create Stream channels
  • Run reports on Stream users. User reports include:
    • User’s unique ID
    • A list of the user’s uploaded videos
    • A list of the videos the user has access to
    • A list of channels the user has created
    • A list of all the groups the user is a member of
    • A list of all comments the user has made on Stream videos
  • Alter Stream videos (normally only video owners can edit video details)
  • Delete video comments

Stream permissions:

• Stream videos can be secured with unique permissions. You can name specific users, leverage Active Directory groups or define an Office 365 group
• No security can be set up for a Stream video channel on its own. Permissions are managed at the individual Stream video level or at the Office 365 group level
• Stream does not support guest or external anonymous user access (possibly coming in 2019). In order to view a video in Stream today, all users must have an Office 365 Stream license

Office 365 Video to Stream migration:

• Microsoft is programmatically going to migrate customers. Beta migrations are occurring in May 2018, with opt-in and opt-out customer migrations coming afterwards. (No specific timeline has been set.) Eventually, customers will not be able to opt-out; all Office 365 Videos will be migrated to Stream programmatically
• Migration process is built into the browser interface. All content will be available for review in Stream before you go live

Stream roadmap (aka future items being defined and/or developed):

• Stream mobile app with offline playback
• Responsive channel web part for SharePoint
• Teams meeting recordings auto-published to Stream
• Branding via Office 365 suite navigation bar
• External public anonymous videos
• Video analytics/stats
• Integration with enterprise search
• Playlists
• Interactive videos

Links for more information

• Forum (http://aka.ms/StreamForum)
• Vote on ideas (http://aka.ms/StreamIdeas)
• Roadmap (http://aka.ms/StreamRoadmap)
• Ask Stream Anything product team session, to be held on May 30, 2018 at 9am PST (https://aka.ms/StreamAMA)