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.
