Videomanagement with Microsoft Stream

Microsoft Stream is now public available. It’s an intelligent enterprise video-service which can be used as company-wide Streaming service for internal videos. Typically examples are training videos, employer branding, company news, product news or product trainings as well as trainings in common.

This service offers you the possibility to organize your company videos with a video management plattform without having to deal with servers, rendering technology, sizing. Just upload, make tags, organize your channels and you’re done. It’s ready for mobile screens and desktop. Using Microsoft Stream is like youtube for enterprise.

Microsoft Stream as Enterprise Video Platform based on Azure Cloud

It’s for enterprise not because it has similiar functions as youtube, but you can use azure AD connection so that your staff can use single sign on. It integrates into your office world like Office 365 or M365 with its features Microsoft Stream, Yammer, Office Groups and so on. It offers a good solution to organize and deliver your videos rather than save them on a local file storage.

Let’s have a look at what features are there.

Features

Of course you can upload videos – but the most interesting part are the other features.

Organize

If you imagine your videos are stored in a fileshare you always get the questions how to organize them. Mostly they are organized with subfolders and nobody can search for important word which describe the video. In Microsoft Stream you have the possibility to organize your videos with description, hashtags and in channels or groups, so that users get the possibility to search for the relevant content. Videos are expensive in production or time intensive, so you should make them easily accessible for your audience – if you see the features and use yourself youtube you know how easy it can be to find a good video. Features of Microsoft Stream are:

• Create Channels
• Using Hashtags
• Set Permissions
• Like and comment videos
• Integrated in Office 365 Groups
• unlimited streaming in your company
• Auto-Create subtitles
• Search Videos by title or description, hastags
• Starting page with popular videos
• Watchlist

Sharing

• Mobile browser supported
• Share it in Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Sway, etc.
• Embed Videos anywhere else

• send per E-Mail
• Share by link

Advanced Features

You can search for videos. Nothing special, but there is the possiblity to search also the transcripted speech from video, like a fulltext index in normal documents. Face-recognition is also possible.

Pricing

The Pricing is simple. You have two plans. Depends on features you like. And if you have already an office 365 Subscription it could be that you have access to it.

The pricing includes unlimited streaming. The streaming is done in the background based on Azure Services.

Azure as Basic for this Cloud Service

Microsoft Stream stores the videos and metadata in a azure based service. It contains a storage contigent for uploaded videos. Only the used storage of uploaded videos are important for the calculation of the used contigent in your Microsoft Stream Plan. The transcriptions and streaming is not important for the prices of storage.

Additional Ressources

[1] Pricing https://stream.microsoft.com/de-de/pricing/

[2] Infos about Microsoft Stream

[3] Documentation from Microsoft