What happens with O365 Tenants that have disabled O365 Video?

[Robert Hostetler]

Hello MS Stream folks,

I'm working with a client that has O365 Video disabled. 

Their approach to using O365 has been to slowly turn on various portions of it, like Exchange, SharePoint, Yammer, etc... They are not ready at this time for any Video functionality to be enabled because they have thousands of employees and need to create company policies around how to properly handle video, which is why it was turned off.

So, my concern is that on some random moment, the Stream icon will just appear on the apps launcher for them and there will be an urgent need to turn it off. I've seen the article that describes how to disable it and have shared it with them. But that seems to be a reactive method. My client utilizes change control processes, so if we have to react to it, that will be an unplanned and urgent change, which we try to avoid.

What I would like to know is (1) does Stream stay deactivated for O365 Tenants that have turned off O365 video and (2) if the answer is Microsoft is going to enable it for everyone, then is there some way to proactively disable it before the apps launcher icon will appear?

I did try looking around online for exact wording on this, and haven't seen anything. If this ends up being a duplicate post or the like, my apologies.

Kind regards,

Robert

[#2]

Hi Robert - As of yesterday 6/20 Stream went GA and was enabled by default. As such the Stream tile is now showing up for users with any of the E/A/K Plans for O365. 

We sent out an admin message center post about a month ago stating that Stream was coming and would be on be default.

Stream does not respect the O365 Video on/off flag as it's a separate service and we wanted customers to use/evaluate them independantly. 

There are 2 options to disable Stream in the tenant.

1. Unlicense users - if you turn off the Stream service plan from under the E/A/K plan then the app launcher won't show Stream. 

2. Block Stream's AAD ID - We don't reccomend this option as it could cause confusion in the future when a customer does want to start using Stream. But you can go into AAD for your tenant and block the Stream App ID. This will make Stream not work at all.

See these help article for more information:

https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/stream-license-management/

https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/stream-block-application/

[#3]

Thank you for the clarification!

[#4]

Hello Marc,

Can you elaborate on what whether or not Microsoft has the ability to say to an O365 Admin the exact date and time when the icon should appear on their tenant?

I have a developer O365 tenant via MSDN/my.visualstudio.com subscription and do not recall getting anything like that. But, I am not assuming that a developer tenant behaves the same as a normal one either.

Kind regards,

Robert

[#5]

By the way, option 1 is not enough if any user types directly Stream url in the browser, correct?

[#6]

If the user is not licensed to Stream via the E/A/K plan, then we will block them from using Stream even if they typed in the URL.

The caveat here is that we will allow them to sign up for the free trial of Stream in the case that they typed in the URL directly. THe only why to stop that currently is to block ad-hoc sign-ups on your tenant (which will block ad-hoc sign ups to other services like PowerBI, Flow, etc).

[#7]

...and this blocking has to be done at AAD level