SharePoint Video Playback Quality Defaults to 480p – Horrendous

I manage multimedia training for over 600 locations and two distribution centers, supporting nearly 10,000 team members. We have made a significant investment in producing high-quality training content through professional equipment, structured scripting, and dedicated production and editing time.

However, once videos are uploaded to SharePoint, the default playback quality often degrades the experience to what appears to be approximately 480p. As a result, professionally produced content can look noticeably poor on initial playback.

Many of our store-level team members are not in a position to manually adjust playback settings, so the default experience matters. The source files are high resolution, but the default playback does not reflect that quality.

This also creates issues when leadership reviews training content, because the playback quality can reflect poorly on the production even though the original video is clear. We moved away from third-party hosting due to ad exposure during onboarding and the need for a controlled internal platform. We are intentionally using SharePoint and Stream as part of our existing Microsoft 365 ecosystem for scalability, governance, and centralized access.

Introducing additional paid hosting platforms or external streaming solutions is not a direction we are pursuing. From an enterprise training standpoint, defaulting to low-resolution playback undermines engagement and credibility.

Are there plans to allow administrators to define a default playback resolution for SharePoint or Stream videos? Are there recommended encoding settings that influence the initial playback quality more reliably? Are there roadmap updates around improving adaptive streaming behavior or default resolution selection? Any guidance or insight would be appreciated.