My SharePoint Blogs: Microsoft Stream

Microsoft announced a new service called as ‘Microsoft Stream’. For details, please check out the blog at https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/18/what-microsoft-stream-means-to-office-365/.

It is a new video business service and anyone with a valid business email address can sign up for the service. Microsoft aiming to solve the below business challenges via Microsoft Stream services –

Getting started in seconds to use the service. This has been a challenge due to IT involvement for the end user requirements.
Allow easy upload and organization of videos. With easy drag and drop capabilities, upload your videos and organize them by either starting a channel or contributing to a channel based on team, group, topic etc.
Search the relevant content quickly. There are options like “trending” videos powered by machine learning, as well as search by hash tag, most liked videos and other key search terms.
Watch anywhere, on any device, anytime.
Security on content - who views your video content by determining how widely to share within your organization, and to what channels. Secure application access is enabled by Azure Active Directory, a recognized leader in identity management systems, to protect sensitive corporate content.
Follow what is relevant to you.
Socialize videos by sharing via email, “Like” your Favorites and embed videos to web pages within your organization.

I tried my hands on this service and found it quite easy to use from an end user perspective.

Sign up Process –

Signing up for Stream was easy. What I did, steps are as listed below –

Open an InPrivate browsing session in Edge/Chrome/your fav browser.
Log in to the service https://portal.office.com/ using your Office 365 credentials.
In the same browser session navigate to http://stream.microsoft.com/
Click on the ‘Sign in’ option, which is located in top right of the page. Clicking on sign-in will take you to a page which will have your logged in user email address as below
Click on the ‘Sign up’ button. And the page will take few seconds to loop through the internal process and displays that you are almost there to use the service.
On clicking Start, you will be redirected to share page. Here you can invite other colleagues.
You might land on home page. But just click again for sign in. (this happened during my experience and may not be the case with you).
Now if you go to your Office 365 Apps, you can see the newly added Stream App in app launcher.

Uploading video

Now we can start uploading the videos. Click on the arrow button available in top bar on top right section (highlighted in blue).
On Browse page, you can see the videos sort by options like relevance, trending or other valid options.
On Channels page, you can find channel relevant to you, or popular channels or channel with most videos.

Comparison with Office 365 Video service –

Feature	Microsoft Stream	Office 365 Video
Upload speed	The upload speed was good and similar to O365 Video services ((for 10MB file)	As competent as Stream service. (for 10MB file)
Video Processing	As soon as the video was uploaded, it was available for viewing and defining other attributes (as shows in above screenshot)	It took few seconds to process the video and made available for viewing.
Sharing	You can share the video using URL directly.	You can use the URL same way to share it or using email.
Embedding	The portal provides you an option to choose the frame size and auto play property for your web pages.	It is depending on who you embed your video in the page.
Multi device support with bandwidth	Stream offer multiple quality of video options.	Video portal has good options but less than Stream service.
Statics	Like, View statistics are immediately available.	It takes up to 1 days to process the statics and
Overall comparison	Overall, Stream service offer the same as Video but with New Look Fast statistics processing More video quality options Similar to other video service in consumer space But miss options like Yammer, download (I haven’t seen an easy way to download it), finding embed code for video.