Forum Discussion
Microsoft Stream is no Replacement for Office Mix
I am having problems understanding how Microsoft Stream is a replacement for Office Mix. It takes hours to upload a video to Microsoft Stream that takes about 3 or 4 minutes with Office Mix.
There is no embedded interactivity with Microsoft Stream. I do like the ability to upload videos that were not created with PowerPoint.
I am puzzled why you would give the axe to Office Mix when you have no replacement for it. While there were occasional glitches with Mix, it was a really great tool.
28 Replies
- Any update to this? Specifically, does Stream have interactivity?
- Marc Mroz
Microsoft
Stream does not yet have interactivity like was there in Office Mix. We are still investigating and working on how we can bring more of the cool things from Office Mix into Stream like interactivity. We'll keep you posted as things like interactivity take more shape in the coming months.
Can we please get an update on when interactivity is coming to Stream? It's a showstopper right now for using videos in an educational context. It's been mentioned several times in this thread that it's being investigated but there is no mention of it on the O365 roadmap...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Microsoft%20Stream%2CIn%20Development
...nor on the Stream vs O365 Video comparison published in July:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/office-365-video-feature-breakdown
As the instructional sys admin for O365 in our school district I cannot stress how disappointed I am with how this was handled. If the writing was on the wall that Mix had to be retired, MS should have at least had Stream ready day 1 with the same or similar feature sets. Our teachers relied on this tool for flipping their instruction and district departments used Mix videos embedded in our LMS for district wide training. I understand the fact that Mix was in 'preview', but it is our teachers, students and families that will feel the brunt of this change. We aren't talking anything super technical either...just give users the ability to share/embed a video and not require login. That should take until Q4 of 2018 to roll out. Improve the experience to mimic Mix first...then add additional features...you did it with the transition from Classroom to Teams...why should this be any different?
Agreed! As an educator, I have uploaded daily lessons to Mix from PowerPoint in 20mins or less for a 40 minute lesson. Now with Stream, I am lucky if they upload after 4 hours, if they upload at all. To give Mix the axe before having a suitable replacement is just bad planning.
If uploading a video to Mix and Stream are essentially the same idea, why does Stream take infinitely longer than Mix?
- Marc Mroz
Joshua Mocherman - I'm sorry for the frustration we've caused everyone. Uploading to Mix and Stream are doing 2 different things which is why you see such a long delay. See my post above from 3-2-18 for more details: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Stream-Forum/Microsoft-Stream-is-no-Replacement-for-Office-Mix/m-p/167197/highlight/true#M1628
I think we all understand that. But that doesnt really help all the people trying to upload a 2gig video for every lecture?
Second, if for whatever reason the upload fails, the video render has to start all over again!
You need to realise how this is really making what was a great product into a terrible educational product--not because of the software itself but because of the upload process!
Quick question/comment that goes along with all of this...I understand the longer time is because of it becoming a video, I already was saving my mixes as MP4s because of the program I was uploading them to, so the time thing does not bother me. My question is more about the use of Mix. As an educator, I used mix to make lessons for an on-line course. With Mix going away, is there now not a way for me to make a video using PowerPoint? If not, did y'all really not think that part through, as that was, in my opinion, the entire point of Mix and if Stream is supposed to "replace" Mix, why can I not make the videos, that was kinda the whole point. And, if Stream does not allow that to happen, does Microsoft have a program that does work with PP and make a video, if so, what?
Hello Nicole,
If you are trying to create a video from your PowerPoint project, go to File, Export and Create a Video. I too like and use the MP4 files (I often upload these to YouTube), but I am missing the interactivity that Mix supported (create a quiz in a presentation and gather student responses for example.)
The problem I was having before MIX is that audio did not transfer into the video -- which of course made it utterly useless as a training option. Will Stream capture audio? and animations? I do quizzes, etc. in a different format, so that isn't an issue for me.
I would like to add my voice to those here. I am extremely disappointed in the discontinuation of Office Mix. Why take a fully functional, well-used service that was loved by educators and discontinue it to replace it with something that other services (i.e. YouTube) already does much, much better. I just migrated over 300 Mixes to Stream. My Mixes had a privacy setting that made them only visible by someone who had the link. They are now in Stream and fully, publicly available to my entire company. To change anything (privacy, add them to a channel or group, etc.), I have to go video by video. Even to delete them, I have to do it one at a time which is simply ridiculous! The documentation provided about the migration was seriously lacking.
I can understand a desire to condense various services into one. The transition of Microsoft Classroom into Microsoft Teams was fairly well-handled. But this whole process reeks of short-sightedness and lack of thought about the users of the Mix service and their needs. If I had known that this would be the outcome of moving my videos into Stream, I would never have done it.
I hope that the team working on Stream gets it together and implements bulk actions ASAP.
Again, as with everyone, the move to Stream is just dumping what was a great program (mix) and if had known they were going to dump it would never have put all the time in to have education programs here in the first place. I had asked the support people multiple times if the program would be around and always had response that it would be.
Have a month to go and still have not figured out a good reasonable program/platform to move to. Stream is not the answer.
I was reluctant to jump into Mix fully for fear that it was too good to last. I am a high school mathematics teacher and I realize that Mix is/was the perfect platform for creating and delivering content to students. I would like to know more about the plans for Stream and PowerPoint recording.
Matthew SheetsAny response here?- Marc Mroz
Christopher Sherman - You are correct that Microsoft Stream is not a full replacement for Office Mix. We plan over the course of time to bring some of the awesome features of Mix to Stream, but right now Stream lets you play your Mixes as videos.
Can you give more specifics on upload times that took really long on Stream? Are you talking time to upload the file to Stream only, or time it took to be able to play the video after transcoding was done? If you give us more specifics there we might be able to see what's going on.
I am having a similar issue. I teach online courses using recorded Powerpoint lectures. With Mix, I would record the lecture and the "Upload to Mix." The upload process took 5 minutes or less. Now, I use the Record feature, then have to "Export to Video" which can take over an hour, then upload that video to Stream, which also takes substantially longer than the Mix upload time. I was such a proponent of Mix and I recommended it to everyone I knew who taught online as a perfect platform for professor's needs, so I am very disappointed that the replacement for Mix is so cumbersome and time intensive.
- Marc Mroz
Elena Windsong - We hear your concerns and frustrations and are looking into how we can bring some of the best of Office Mix into Stream/PowerPoint. We need to get a little further along in our planning, designing, and thinking before we can share more specifics. But we are listening and taking action internally here on the Stream and PowerPoint teams.
Let me give a little bit of clarification here to explain what you are seeing. I know this doesn't solve anything for you but I want to make sure you understand what is currently happening and a little of the why.
The Recording tab with "Publish to Stream" and Office Mix are very different solutions, they are similar but not the same. When you click the "Publish to Stream" button, PowerPoint is physically rendering out a video of your PowerPoint, stitching together the animations, video, inking, slide transitions, etc. This is why you are seeing longer delays in upload. Publish is really render a video, then upload to Stream. The rendering a video in PowerPoint on your computer is what is taking so long.
The Office Mix service was different in it's approach. Office Mix had an entire service behind it that handled these special PPTX files created in PowerPoint. When you published to Office Mix you were just uploading the PPTX and raw video files inside of if you did screen recording or web cam capture. The Office Mix service then did all work from there. When you played an office mix it was automatically switching in the Mix player between videos, slides, etc. It only needed to render out a flat video file in some cases for mobile. As such the publish time from PowerPoint to playback was much less than what I described above for publishing to Stream. The issue is that Office Mix service was a beta/preview service. As such it didn't have all the compliance, standards, and governance of a full fledged O365 service. Unfortunately not all preview/beta services turn into full services. But we are looking now very seriously about how we can bridge that gap with PowerPoint and Stream.
I know this is frustrating and we are sorry for the pain this has caused.
Agree. this is really a problem as I also produced quite a few training modules that are interactive. I put a ton of work into these and now the whole this is just useless. They don't work without being online in mix. Stream is just a video. If I wanted to do videos I would have done videos.
What replacement is there?
Couldn't agree more to the comments in these posts.
I am a high school Physics teachers and had tentatively begun to move all my efforts in on-line teaching resources to Mix and, like other contributors, had promoted the product strongly in my school, running a number of INSET sessions on it.
Mix was brilliant - easier to use than all the methods I had toyed with previously. And the ability to embed other HTML5 content, such as interactive PhET simulations, was so exciting.
I'm hoping Stream will get there in the end but at the moment I think we've taken a big step backward.
