Earlier today, we announced General Availability (GA) of Microsoft Stream (see the Microsoft Blog post as well as the Office 365 blog post to catch up with the announcements). We started this journey with you all back in July 2016 when we announced the public preview of Stream and it’s been fun leading up to the GA release. We really appreciate all the feedback you shared with us and we used that to shape up the GA release. We announced a bunch of really cool capabilities today so let’s start with looking at a summary first.
Key capabilities in GA
New revamped UI – all new home page and also updates throughout the service.
Intelligent / cognitive abilities – Stream is now able to do speech-to-text to convert all spoken words to text and make them searchable. With this you can not only find videos that may otherwise have been hard to find, you can also find where in the video the words were mentioned making you more productive than ever.
Support for Office 365 Groups – a lot of you had asked for this capability. With Stream Groups now you can share content privately with your team or another group of people. As this is built on Office 365 Groups, you will re-use your existing groups that were created in Teams, SharePoint sites or Yammer. Now, you can manage users in a single place and share videos with them securely.
Seamless integration with Office 365 Apps – whether you are using Teams, SharePoint, OneNote, Sway or Yammer, Stream makes it easy to share your videos and watch them in these apps making your video reach more people and help you collaborate better with video.
More control over how you consume videos – Stream now let’s you control playback speed (speed up or slow down the videos), supports click-able time codes in description to help you build table of contents, time codes in comments to better understand the context around comments and the unique ability to navigate video using face timelines. You can easily click on the timeline for where a person appears in the video and use that to navigate the video.
More IT Management capabilities – Admins can restrict who can upload and create channels, manage groups in Group Admin experience, set content policies and administer content to add, remove owners, change metadata or delete videos. You as Admin are in complete control.
We really hope you enjoy these new capabilities in Stream along with the new experience. With the help of our friends over at Microsoft Mechanics we recorded a quick 5 min. demo. Please check it out!
There are still some other capabilities that we are still working on like support for public anonymous access on videos, analytics and live streaming to name a few. As we make more progress on these we’d definitely keep you updated via this blog. Beyond these we have a very robust roadmap and like always we’d love all your feedback in helping us inform the roadmap.
Office 365 Video and transition to Stream
Thanks to your continued feedback, ideas, and support, Office 365 Video has validated our belief that video is increasingly important for all kinds of organizations. The success, usage, and engagement of Office 365 Video has allowed us to expand our efforts in the enterprise video market and allowed us to launch the successor to Office 365 Video, Microsoft Stream.
As we’ve mentioned in the past Office 365 Video will be converged with Microsoft Stream over next several months in a phased approach. The first phase of transition is estimated to start some time in Q3/Q4 2017. As such, at this point in time, there will be no change to Office 365 video. When we are ready for the transition, we will reach out via the Office 365 Admin center and also use that channel to keep you up to date on the progress.
For more detailed information, answers to common questions about Office 365 Video transitioning to Microsoft Stream, and a detailed comparison of the differences between O365 Video and Stream, see this help article: Office 365 Video transition to Stream.
If you are already using Office 365 Video you can continue to do so. We will continue to make improvements, maintain, and support O365 Video during this transition. However, once we’ve incorporated the best of O365 Video into Stream and have transitioned all existing O365 Video customers and their videos into Stream, we will retire the existing Office 365 Video portal and iOS app.
If you are just starting with enterprise video we encourage you to look at and consider using Microsoft Stream.
Stream community has moved
We are also using the GA milestone to move our community over to Microsoft Tech Community which has already been the home for many other communities like Teams, SharePoint, Yammer and Office 365 Video. We know a lot of you are already using Microsoft Tech community and this change should help you keep in touch with us even more.
The community was moved over earlier today so please go ahead and join Microsoft Stream community. All ideas and forum topics were moved already to make this transition smoother. Starting now, you can ask us any questions or share ideas on our community at the new location. Once again, we look forward to continued support from you, and look forward to your feedback and ideas that got us this far.
Get started and join us for an AMA session
If you are a current Office 365 customer, you can find Microsoft Stream in the Office app launcher, or visit the Microsoft Stream website to sign in. If you don’t have Office 365, please consider a Microsoft Stream standalone plan or start your free trial right away.
We know you might have questions and to answer all your questions we request you to join our Ask Us Anything session on the Microsoft Tech Community on June 29, 2017 at 9 a.m. PDT (UTC-8). We look forward to you joining us and we’ll all be there answering your questions.
Additional Resources
Here are some more resources to help to get more information
