Two different web players in Stream (on SharePoint) - what's the reason?

[Kevin Crossman]

When I see a video in OneDrive/SharePoint, I click on it and I get this player page shown on the left. There is the option to "open in Stream" which opens the same video but has more of a Stream branded look and also changes some of the options (embed is under the Share menu not the "..." menu, for example)

What's the purpose of this duality? Will one of these eventually go away?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

We'd love your and everyone's feedback and thoughts on the this. The one on the left is what we show when you open the video from the library in ODB or SPO. It's meant to be a preview experience for files in ODSP. See the next back buttons on the top right and the x to close and go back to the list of files. The thought is you want to iterate through image and video files in a folder.

The one on the right is the full page app experience. No next back or close to go back to the file list. We launch this experience from share links, search results, web part clicks, etc because you are only focused on a single video.

The current implementation is opposite of office files in odsp in libraries. Click goes to full page app and ... > Preview goes to a preview mode for the file with next and back and close.

Do you think the way we have it now makes sense? Or should we flip flop it to make click go to full page app Stream and have Preview player only happen from ... > Preview?

[#3]

a) Should definitely behave like other first party Office file types

b) It is REALLY confusing to have this dual experience. I'm trying to write up instructions for the Embed feature and now have to explain that if you're in one experience the embed is over here but if you're in the other experience it is over there. (see also Sharing the file).

Honestly, if you're going all in on this Stream rebranding/transition I don't see any reason to provide that "preview" experience. If someone clicks on the video, just pop it into a new window like the Office files do.

I can see why you'd want a preview for images, so you could go through them in a lightbox sort of way. But I don't foresee a lot of that for videos (it would be even less of a need if a site owner was able for force the doclib into Tile view, but I know that's a SharePoint team thing).

[#4]

Thanks Kevin for that feedback! Anyone else have thoughts on this?

[#5]

I agree with Kevin. Organizational change is impacted when heavy Stream users are presented different playback experiences.