New Stream Webpart - Disappointing

[gjen020]

The new Stream Webpart has just come through to our tenant and started to set it up to see how it actually works. Quite disappointing so far, and not fit for purpose in our video architecture.

I was hoping for something similar to the Highlighted Content Webpart where you have a lot of sources, filtering and sorting options, etc. Would have liked to see Microsoft use this as a base, and retrofit the ability to play videos inline, additional display options such as Gallery (which they have) and Playlist (which is apparently coming soon).

As part of the migration from Stream (Classic) to Stream (on SharePoint) we are looking to upload all our videos to Document Libraries without folders and use metadata for Channels, Categories, etc. This way we can associate our videos to multiple Channels which we wouldn't be able to do with folders. Also, a flat architecture is a much better option for effective filtering, searching, etc.

However, the only source options available where we could limit what videos are displayed are using Folder. So, for us, we can't use the new Stream Webpart at all for displaying our videos by Channel, Category, etc. You also can't select multiple sites or sites associated to a hub to return videos from. Only from this site, or a single site. Highlighted Content Webpart allows you to select multiple sites which again is something we need.

Stream Webpart

• Videos on this site (brings back all videos without any filtering options)
• Folder (no filtering options)
• Single video

Highlighted Content Webpart (a lot of filtering options regardless of what source you select)

• All sites in the hub
• This site
• A document library on this site
• This site collection
• The page library on this site (wouldn't apply to videos)
• Select sites
• All sites

Also, when selecting Folder or Single video and you want to get from another site, it only shows recent or favorited sites (and not all of them) with no ability to search for and select a specific site. This is a real painful experience where you have to go out to the site you want to select first a few times and hope it shows up for you to select. This is also noted in the following post: New Stream Web Part - Source > Folder > From Sites > Only shows recent shared libraries - Microsoft ...

The new Stream Webpart also currently has very limited Sorting options available.

Stream Webpart

• Recently created
• Recently edited
• Author

Highlighted Content Webpart

• Most recent
• Most viewed
• Trending
• Managed property ascending
• Managed property descending

Looks like we're stuck with File and Media Webpart for single videos, and Highlighted Content Webpart for multiple videos for the foreseeable future.

Really hoping to see the new Stream Webpart get some much-needed improvements over the next few months!! Microsoft, any plans for implementing any of these missing features?

[#2]

Literally every single word of this is EXACTLY how I feel. I'm glad to know I'm not alone!
Whenever the Highlighted Content web part has inline playback, I wish there was a way to make it not say the name of the folder or site the video is stored in. ALL of the folders on my sites show up as "Forms" (which I've been told is "by design" by Microsoft; I do not understand why anyone thinks that's ideal for the general viewer). The viewer doesn't have a need to know where the video is stored. It's just wasted space and links to something that sends the viewer into a confusing space they don't need to be in.

[#3]

It is disappointing to hear that the web part lacks expected functionalities for videos. The new Stream web part was born out of the idea of having a dedicated video web part more suited to video experiences and layouts which was not achievable with other web parts like Highlighted content or Hero or File and Media. So, our first goal was to introduce a web part that is optimized for video and then incrementally add functionalities to it.
While we are currently in between our planning process for the next iteration, I'm going to incorporate all this feedback into deciding the order of what comes next. So, thanks for highlighting them.
Meanwhile, I would recommend that if your use case aligns with filtering some videos, you should use Highlighted content web part which will soon be supported with inline playback in filmstrip and carousel layouts. However, if your use case aligns with publishing all videos from a particular folder, you can use the new Stream web part.

[#4]

I think you summarized this well for most people who have been waiting for the Stream web part replacement to work with videos stored in SharePoint. In case you didn't realize it, there is the ability to create a Playlist for videos. Personally, I would never have built it the way it was done, but it is what we have. You have to add a List and Playlist is a template. Or, if you go to the Stream homepage creating a Playlist there is an option. It has had some updates and the display is nice and finally you can select it as a list to display on a page using the List web part. However, I don't like that it is literally a Microsoft List and you are pulling in references to where the videos live. It would've been better to create a new view on a library or build something off the Highlighted Content web part as you have noted in your post. But. . . at least with the Playlist you can use metadata properties and pull in videos across multiple sites. I think the File and Media web part and the Highlighted Content web part - especially as the inline formats roll out - are going to be the way to go for the near (and maybe distant) future. I did note that @Tasmania has a point about the web part displaying the site for videos. It would definitely be great if the file type selected didn't display that - or better yet if you could just decide if you want it to show for any file type. I can think of use cases to hide it for documents also.

[#5]

While I initially loved the idea of the playlist, the fact that you can't embed a list on more that one site pretty much crushed my dreams for them.

[#6]

Playlists is built out of MS List infrastructure, and I can imagine that interoperability between these two apps would be painful. We do have plans to expose the front-end experience for playlists in Stream, while it leverages Lists as backend.
However, currently the team is focused to make the playlist creation and sharing easier and then take up the UI update with additional video specific layouts to make it more intuitive for Stream users. Thanks for sharing your feedback here.

[#7]

Did you mean embedding the playlist inside SharePoint site or sites outside of SharePoint?

[#8]

@Debaray, I believe that @Tasmania is referring to the fact that when you use the List webpart, you can only select Lists that are created in the current site. So, you can't display the playlist from other sites.

[#9]

I've just added another post that goes through the Playlist options (good and bad). Still not something we are looking to use, especially given the size of our company (50,000+ users) and the large number of groups/channels/videos.

Playlist - The good and the bad 

[#10]

If you could provide the Playlist format as an option using the Highlighted Content web part - then we would be in business. That would allow us to use managed properties to pull in videos automatically and display them in the nice playlist UI. And. . . it would work across multiple sites which users are asking for. Otherwise. . . unless I need a playlist for a specific site. . . I'm just waiting for the new inline options with the highlighted content web part as it will be much more versatile and intuitive.

[#11]

Very useful post. I'm hoping that @Marc Mroz and team are thinking this is just the first iteration of the Stream Webpart with improvements you outlined coming soon.

[#12]

@Debaray In our case the Highlighted Content web part would do everything we need it to do EXCEPT that you can't pull from OneDrive--only other SharePoint sites. We are storing most of our videos in OneDrive because of SharePoint storage limitations (not to mention OneDrive is where Teams recordings save by default). I was glad to see the new Stream web part had an option to pull from a OneDrive folder, but the lack of ability to filter makes it useless to us. Please either build in a OneDrive option to the Highlighted Content web part, or give the Stream web part the same filtering functionality as the Highlighted Content web part!

[#13]

@tjhunt 

Why would you store large amounts of files in OneDrive because of storage? The amount of storage in your tenant that is displayed in the SharePoint Admin Center is the total storage used by OneDrive AND SharePoint (because OneDrive accounts behind the covers are SharePoint sites). If you need any SharePoint sites to have more storage space and they don't, then your SharePoint administrator should consider following Microsoft recommendations to allow automatic sizing of SharePoint sites in the admin center. 

In the event that you might be the SharePoint Administrator, here is where that is located in your admin center. Policies > SharePoint Site Storage limits

A panel will open on the right side of the screen. Select Automatic.

This is a best practice even without videos being stored. I have seen more SharePoint sites blow up where users are unable to continue collaborating because SharePoint admins rarely have time to be monitoring every single site to see if any have come close to exceeding whatever limit they put in there. This will solve your problem. Then you can move your files to a SharePoint site and the Highlighted Content web part will work for you. 

Besides. . . putting files in OneDrive accounts are a problem with file lifecycle management. If someone leaves the organization and you want to remove the license on the account, then all access to those files are lost on your web pages also. On the SharePoint site, you won't have that issue to contend with down the road.

[#14]

@karen_dredske Thanks for your reply. Under our license structure, OneDrive storage is provisioned per licensed user and can't be reallocated to our SharePoint tenant storage. (I just confirmed this with our tenant admin.) Totally agree that storing organizational files in OneDrive is not a best practice, and it does require shuffling on our end if licenses are reassigned, but it's a partial solution that lets users share their videos without eating up our SharePoint storage.

[#15]

@tjhunt the tenant admin or SharePoint admin doesn't manually allocate any of this. You are allowed to use up to 1TB in OneDrive for each license, but if no one uses 1TB, that difference can be used in SharePoint. In the upper right corner of the SharePoint Admin center there is a scale that tells the admin how many TB have been used of the TB available. That number of TB available is all the SharePoint sites plus all the OneDrive sites in use.

You can find the licensing info here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/sharepoint-online-service-descriptio...

Here is more information on what happens when you set automatic storage limits for SharePoint sites (and the storage limit is separate for OneDrive). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-site-collection-storage-limits However, what is displayed in the SharePoint Admin center is what is available across the tenant.

So . . . you could have your SP Admin or tenant admin reduce the storage amount you want to allow your users in OneDrive and that would guarantee more space for SharePoint sites to be available. If you dropped the OneDrive storage to 500GB or less per user, then all that extra storage would still be available to your tenant and could be used in your SharePoint sites. If you set the SharePoint site storage to be automatic, there is still a limit per site, but it is 25TB.

Hopefully that will help you out a bit or at least give your admin something to think about that might allow you to use best practices for storing those video files.

[#16]

I just don't think that's true. The total storage we have available in SharePoint is far less than it would be if it included the 1TB for each of our users, and the SP service description explicitly says (in the footnotes) that total storage per organization does not include the OneDrive created for each licensed user. I won't take up more space here arguing about it, but it looks like others have had this question before. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/can-i-transfer-onedrive-for-business-storageq...

[#17]

I agree - your OneDrive storage is completely separate from your overall SharePoint storage quota. What you see in the SharePoint Admin Center is specifically for SharePoint and is calculated as a base amount of storage (per tenant) plus additional storage per license (amount depends on the license).

So, in addition to the SharePoint storage, each user gets 1TB for their OneDrive account which can "theoretically" be increased to 5TB (per user) by asking Microsoft. I'm not sure if you need a specific justification, but worth asking your Microsoft rep on this.

I do feel that storing a lot of company/department videos in OneDrive isn't ideal, but the only other option is to purchase more SharePoint storage. I'm not sure entirely how much additional storage costs as Microsoft don't seem to publish this information, and instead get you to discuss with a Microsoft rep. I guess you would need to weigh up the pros/cons of using OneDrive vs. purchasing additional SharePoint storage.

If you were looking to decrease your overall SharePoint storage, you could look at how many versions of documents you are storing as this can increase the size significantly, especially if you have 100+ versions of a document. I'd also look at options around archiving some of your SharePoint storage to lower tier Azure storage if it makes sense (might be lower cost to do this than purchase more SharePoint storage).

[#18]

@tjhunt Some great news for you. The Highlighted Content Webpart can bring videos from OneDrive now using the KQL Query option.

Make sure you select All sites initially, then click on Custom query. This will bring up the KQL Query section where you can specify where you want to pull videos from as well as other filters. Below is a query that brings back videos from a folder in my OneDrive called Videos (it contains 4 videos).

//You would need to put your tenant in place of TENANT
//You would need to put your userPrincipalName in place of USERPRINCIPALNAME
//You would need to put your specific folder(s) in place of FOLDER

//Note that you need to add /* at the end of your last folder

documentlink:"https://TENANT-my.sharepoint.com/personal/USERPRINCIPALNAME_TENANT_onmicrosoft_com/Documents/FOLDER/*" AND (FileType:3gp OR FileType:asf OR FileType:avi OR FileType:mkv OR FileType:mod OR FileType:mov OR FileType:mp4 OR FileType:mpeg OR FileType:mpg OR FileType:mts OR FileType:ts OR FileType:vob OR FileType:wmv OR FileType:webm)

Below are my four videos in the Videos folder.

And my Highlighted Content Webpart showing the videos.

[#19]

That is great news! I will give that a try.
As for storage, we did limit our versioning, but it won't let us set the maximum below 100, so with larger files it still adds up quickly. I'll check with our Network Administrator about the Azure storage. Thanks for your replies and suggestions!

[#20]

@tjhunt I know it's been a while since your reply, but thought it was worth adding the below so that yourself, or others can see how to reduce versions on lists and libraries. See examples below taken from the PnP PowerShell site: Set-PnPList | PnP PowerShell

#You would replace TENANT with your tenant, and SITE with your site
Connect-PnPOnline -Url "https://TENANT.sharepoint.com/sites/SITE" -Interactive


#Disable versions
Set-PnPList -Identity "Demo Library" -EnableVersioning $false

#Limit major versions (minimum of 1 version)
Set-PnPList -Identity "Demo Library" -EnableVersioning $true -MajorVersions 20

#Limit major and minor verions (minimum of 1 version for major and minor)
Set-PnPList -Identity "Demo Library" -EnableVersioning $true -EnableMinorVersions $true -MajorVersions 20 -MinorVersions 5

Note that if you have a document that contains (for example) 10 versions, and you run the script to reduce versions to 5, that document will still have 10 versions until you update it again. So, reducing versions on the list/library won't automatically reduce the current versions for an item/document that are above what you set.