Hopefully this review helps a few people considering whether Microsoft Stream is a good fit for your company. I’ve worked for a large MSFT shop for a few years, I’m in charge of our corporate communications and internal town hall communications. For years we have purposely embedded video players in SharePoint pages to protect the content and make it easy for employees tuning in for a live stream broadcast to access it securely using their existing user credentials from SharePoint.
When Microsoft Stream came out as a new alternative to 365 Video, I got very excited. I had hoped that Microsoft was finally coming around to online video technology and with that, up-leveling their video platform as a result.
Pros: MSFT certainly up-leveled their video technology game with Microsoft Stream. The platform brings a number of new features and capabilities including live streaming across Stream and Teams. Stream also comes with the ability to create portal pages and integrates almost seamlessly with Active Directory and SharePoint. For those reasons I’m a big fan.
Cons: The platform very much still feels like a beta product and there is very little information about product roadmap and development timelines. One of the biggest downfalls with Stream that I hope they fix is external sharing. This doesn’t exist today, but sure needs to so we can share video with non-employees and make the content more accessible — embeddable video players would be nice.
The automated built in video transcription feature is fantastic for search and finding a video because you can basically search for any word or phrase said in the video and find all videos that have similar phrases. Super cool tool, but unfortunately the transcription is automated and therefore comes with a lot of errors and misspellings rendering it useless for ADA compliance.
Regardless of the negatives here, I do believe there is a strong future with Microsoft Stream.