Microsoft Stream was launched just over three years ago as the service to replace Office 365 Video, providing corporate video streaming and sharing video capabilities.
In October 2020, Microsoft announced that Stream would be much better integrated with Microsoft 365 to provide ‘fast, intelligent video’ capabilities for all users. So, what does this mean in practice?
Classic Stream vs New Stream
In terms of terminology there is now ‘Classic’ Stream, which is what every customer has now. New Stream is the future service and there will be a transition period where customers are switched from Classic to New.
Although the user impact of New Stream may not be enormous, it is a large technical change from Microsoft’s point of view with a complete rebuilding of the Stream video service in aggressive timelines.
From a Microsoft 365 administration point of view, the primary change is that New Stream will use OneDrive or SharePoint to store videos (as an MP4 file) rather than the separate Stream service. A Stream video will therefore be treated in the same way as any other file being stored in SharePoint/OneDrive.
SharePoint will be used where a meeting recording is within a Microsoft 365 Group / Teams channel. Where the recording is not linked to a group, the organisers OneDrive will be used.