This is going to be huge. 10 years ago, I would never have thought that technology alone sufficiently differentiated YouTube from "long tail" offerings like Vevo or Twitch. It turns out you can have multiple, multiple-billion-dollar businesses using essentially the same platform. The use cases inherent to various content niches inform new user interfaces and modes of interacting with the underlying video data.
Enterprise Video is a huge content niche. I've used YouTube in the past for business videos, but it was awkward. I wanted greater privacy, which YouTube does not really offer, because these videos discussed pre-launch ideas. We already used Office 365, so Microsoft Stream would have been a no-brainer.
I would love to perform research with the MS Stream platform, too. By focusing on the niche of business, Stream is creating interesting audience dynamics that will be quite different from the "grazing" model of recreational video watching. This is relevant to my interests.
"Enterprise Video is a huge content niche." - most definitely, almost this exact same thing is in my ideas notebook (as I'm sure it is for many people), especially with Office 365 integration.
There's going to be a whole ecosystem around more internal video production, webinars and training sessions going forwards. Going to be a really nice niche.
I have the need to produce internal webinars for a reasonably sized organisation. It will be interesting to see if they add live streaming, the ability to have real-time text chat and screensharing.
Its slightly odd that a product called Stream doesn't actually 'stream' - though I understand that they are using th eterm in a different way here.
Now that would be very useful - screensharing, and Powerpoint slide switching integration would be the winner for me too. Webinars are a really interesting area - how much time do you dedicate to them if you don't mind me asking?
At the moment - none at all, we're in the process of setting everything up. But we're going to have one scheduled for every two months, lasting an hour. These won't be purely for internal consumption however, they will be for training at partner organisations.
I work on enterprise video for a number of years and the biggest problem isn't a delivery platform, it's infrastructure being ill suited for video.
A lot of enterprises are setup with a Spoke-Hub topology where all network data passes through the hub. Sometimes this is done for auditing purposes, and other times it's for security. Sometimes remote offices do not have internet access despite an internet connection. Their edge routers just use a VPN tunnel or MPLS network back into the hub.
In the end it's no distribution that kills but bandwidth. That why peer-to-peer video and multicasting are still around. Because in a lot of cases you can have one person browsing Youtube or watching a webcast from his desk and it will completely saturate the office data line.
Good point. Microsoft clearly got the memo. I work for a peer-to-peer video delivery provider (Kollective) and we partner with Microsoft to scale video delivery on enterprise networks.
Maybe things aren't as bad as I imagine them to be, but my immediate reaction to this was that now instead of working we are all going to be required to spend time watching "enterprise" videos - as if countless hours being wasted in senseless meetings watching someone's latest PowerPoint creation is not enough. Way to go, coders, way to go...
You'd be surprised. The CYA stuff is what you are forced to see, but there are tons and tons of videos (on this or that esoteric platform) that almost nobody will ever watch, but provide an ego-stroke (and sometimes a job justification) for this or that middle manager.
Enterprise video is always, always made for the benefit of the broadcaster (i.e. management), never for actual workers. Which is why no-one (except management) cares about enterprise video, it's possibly the worst tool for internal training or knowledge sharing.
At a lot of workplaces, there are internal conferences and seminars about all sorts of things. Usually they'll tap on a member of a particular team, and have them give a presentation. Due to the fact that it's about internal code, it won't be applicable to host it on Youtube publicly, so it can just end up being dumped into the company storage servers somewhere.
This would be a good use case: sharing video about company-private materials.
Why? That makes no sense. It's still possible to pick up on information when watching many videos at x2 speed (or x1.5 speed). All you're achieving by disabling such features is making your employees less productive.
Was anybody else a bit confused by how the page says "The content you want, and nothing else - Create a secure, encrypted video site with no ads and no unrelated videos to distract people—and no headaches for your IT department." and right next to it they show a screenshot of a page with "Trending Videos" and "Popular Channels"? Isn't that pretty much the opposite of what they should be showing there?
I think they are demonstrating discovery within-company. That feature will be huge. It potentially eliminates meetings that would have had to occur "between silos" - which are extremely difficult meetings to begin with.
If somebody from team A (on campus 1) can watch a video from team C (on campus 3) without needing their team leaders to coordinate a meeting, this will be extremely valuable to businesses.
But why would team A ever find out about team C? That's where this discovery feature comes in. See what's trending within-company.
Then managers tell their employees to watch a video to influence the trending status and it just becomes another internal propaganda tool. Seen it with internal like buttons and comment sections time and time again.
Instead of YouTube-Enterprise it would be nice to have a way to produce better video. I find it hard to sit through poorly produced and horribly narrated videos, some kind of hosted production service that helps make better videos would be really useful. Coach the user to get better lighting, sound and tighter editing.
I agree - but you want to first make a smooth + easy to use platform to encourage the user to stick around for that coaching. Otherwise, I'll just find the whole experience burdensome.
Hopefully your recommendation is on MSFT's roadmap.
This is great for organizations that are already using office 365. We have been recording lots of presentations, and this is a prefect place to put them.
If there are any Stream folks reading this my one request is an easy way to attach a slide deck to the videos. The video description is an okay place, but it would be even better if there was deeper integration. Like slides on one side of the screen.
Oh man this hurts. I worked with a company several years ago to bring an "enterprise youtube" to market, but it was only ever marketed to pyramid-style corporations as a sales training tool. I believe it's still in use by a few hundred thousand employees, but as far as I know it's still just being artificially restricted to those types of businesses :(
This desperately needs the functionality of Slidepresenter[1], then it would be amazing. Without the option to more easily add more information to the videos, put them next to more context, this could fizzle into a dump for low quality "memos".
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a simple whitelabeling of Lynda (or perhaps adaptation to a slightly tweaked use case -- this doesn't seem focused specifically on organizational eLearning) since Lynda hasn't been discontinued as a service, but that's just off of my quick 30 second glance. Stream and Lynda look like they both do pretty much the same thing, so Microsoft might be capitalizing on its own brand recognition to sell the underlying service to Microsoft shops.
I'm purely speculating, though. Is there anyone on the Stream team who can comment?
Lynda provides a place for authors to upload training videos that can be accessed through a subscription. They are then paid royalties every time someone accesses the video. (At least, that's how Pluralsight works).
Stream allows companies to produce their own videos, for HR, training, and motivational purposes, and host it. Think of it as an internal YouTube.
This is pure speculation, but I'm thinking they leveraged Azure Media Services[1] to deliver Stream, perhaps partially as a hero story for Azure. I feel like it's way too quick for them to have built an entire solution based off the Lynda stuff. I'm not even sure the companies are that integrated yet.
It could provide for some interesting integration. For example, you're a company with 20 employees and a Microsoft Stream account that has a handful of training videos produced internally.
Now, let's say you want your junior programmers to be more familiar with MySQL basics. What if you could buy a Lynda MySQL training video from Microsoft, and have it added to your company Stream? Perhaps you add the video to a category on Stream so it can only be viewed by your junior programmers. Then, the license could charge you for each unique junior programmer that watches the video. If you hire a new junior programmer, you add them to that Stream category, they watch the MySQL training video, you get billed.
"I wouldn't be surprised if this is a simple whitelabeling of Lynda" I don't work on this team so I have no clue to say anything 100%, but given that the LinkedIn deal has not closed yet I see no way how that can be true.
The main scenarios for Stream today are Corporate communications, Knowledge sharing, Training and IT help desk videos. Lynda is a primarily a content site. Stream is a more of a service for customer's own content. It's built on Azure Media Services and Azure.
Definitely, and some reviewers went as far to say that you can just buy the SP4 TypeCover and keep on using your SP3. Didn't work out well for me though, my SP3 was buggy as hell (wifi issues, couldn't wake up from sleep etc).
There were a ton of firmware issues earlier. They have been (mostly) ironed out now. It was baffling when SP4 launched with so many issues. You'd expect that they would have learnt a lot from fixing the issues on SP3.
OT: Let's see how they fare with the SP5. I hope they upgrade the Surface 3 this time.
unlisted videos just means that others can't search for them. If someone gets access to the URL, they can still view the video. Adding video permissions allows the video owners to ensure that people who shouldn't watch your videos can't.
For everyone worried about software jobs going away, this is a good example of something which will create new jobs. Soon, some of us will be spending our time investigating why the green YouTubes [1] "is down for some reason" :-)
I heard Stream and O365 Video will converge and Stream will also stand alone pricing too. So you can get Stream through office, or if you don't want to pay office you can pay Stream alone.
This is absolutly what I have been look for at my company. We are a non-profit educational company and training happens 90% during the start of the year. We need a way to gather ideas and present them to others in our company at our 60+ locations.
I always thought PowerPoint was going to evolve into a hybrid video-presentation platform. Something which would include narration, more fluid and complex transitions / animations along with the ability to jump to specific points in the presentation. Maybe Stream can bring such features to PowerPoint in Office 365
Exactly what it says, which is providing a platform for companies to share videos for a variety of purposes. This was a topic of conversation at one of the companies I worked for, which is a large payroll service provider. The company has a series of offices distributed in many locations around the nation, and whenever a new training or motivational video was release, there was always a question of where to host it. Hosting it in the company's datacenter wouldn't work, as that would consume a lot of bandwidth, and building out a local CDN can be expensive if you don't want to rely on someone else.
Stream is basically providing an internal Youtube, a place where you can upload videos, control who access to them, and let Stream take care of routing, etc.
Video content is 'difficult' for smaller to medium companies to manage and deliver. Some things are best taught through video.
You may be thinking in just a sense of an office, but this could be useful for Factories or other slightly skilled labour.
Add in basic messageboard/etc from a trusted brand, who most people already subscribe to with their OS and Software.
However the 'anyone' can upload, seems like an HR disaster waiting. And I suspect will quickly be turned off to a limited few to the few that use this service.
It's not really enterprise unless it's hooked into a corporate authentication system with policy controls and management capabilities. I'm puzzled why this isn't attached to Office365 for those reasons. The marketing page for it says that it's for companies, but the whole thing makes my inner MS admin twitch: self-sign up with no mention of SSO, docs are pitched as if it's a consumer product with no administrative features. There's no fee or obvious cross-sell, which means that Microsoft are just burning money right now for no obvious gain, which is uncharacteristic of them - they usually provide free stuff that promotes actual paid-for products.
Thanks, that clarifies it - they've hit some kind of wall with Office 365 Video, and are developing Stream to address that. Makes a lot more sense now.
Seems like they are following the ever so popular "lean startup" approach.
They're announcing a small, separate product to validate if there is demand. Then they'll get early users and burn money while they figure out how to make it into a profitable business.
A little late to the game, IMO. Solutions like Kaltura have been around for years. There are ton of "enterprise" video offerings on the market that do all these things... But I guess it doesn't matter, Microsoft just making a product will get it adopted no matter if it's actually good or not. Hopefully it's not as terrible as Sharepoint.
Kaltura has been around for years and they are a very mature product. However, what makes Microsoft Stream more competitive is the future integration with Office and other Microsoft platforms.
During preview, Microsoft Stream and Office 365 Video will co-exist. We will integrate Microsoft Stream into Office 365 to offer one video solution for businesses – whether they use Office 365 or not.
To be fair, although many enterprise organizations use O365, the average customer size is quite small and reflects the fact that most businesses are SMB.
Enterprise Video is a huge content niche. I've used YouTube in the past for business videos, but it was awkward. I wanted greater privacy, which YouTube does not really offer, because these videos discussed pre-launch ideas. We already used Office 365, so Microsoft Stream would have been a no-brainer.
I would love to perform research with the MS Stream platform, too. By focusing on the niche of business, Stream is creating interesting audience dynamics that will be quite different from the "grazing" model of recreational video watching. This is relevant to my interests.