What is Microsoft Stream?

Microsoft Stream is an Enterprise Video service where people in your organization can upload, view, and share videos securely. In plain English? Think of it as YouTube for your school, where the videos that you upload can only be viewed by other members of the school that have an Office 365 login. And you can restrict exactly who can view videos based on groups; for example a staff only group. But sharing the videos is easy, and because it is part of Office 365, you get excellent compatibility with other tools like OneNote, Teams and SharePoint.

Tell Me A Bit More. Why Should I Use Microsoft Stream?

You can easily share videos with other Office 365 applications

So you've uploaded your video into Microsoft Stream, but now you like to make it easily available with colleagues. No problem. Clicking on the share button brings up a window from which you can either e-mail the video directly, copy a link to the video, or get an embed code for the video. How would you use these? E-mail is obvious, although it's worth remembering you can only e-mail to other e-mail addresses within your school's Office 365. If you copy the link to the video, then you can paste this into OneNote and the video will be automatically embedded for you. Or you can use the link for a video (or even a video channel) to add it as a tab in Teams. Finally the embed code allows you to place the video in Sway, or even in other websites. But remember, only users from your organisation will be able to view the video.

Watch this quick video to see more about sharing videos with Microsoft Stream

You can easily upload and organise your videos

Uploading videos is as easy as dragging and dropping the video files onto the Microsoft Stream webpage in Office 365. When you upload a file you can provide a description about it, including the timings of certain important parts in your video. Stream will use this information to make a contents table for the video that people can use to jump to the sections they want to view. Stream can also automatically generate subtitles (closed captions) for you, or you can provide your own transcription file. Finally, you can control who has access to a video by choosing to share it with either the whole organisation, or just certain groups or people. You can also group videos about similar topics into channels, making it easier for people to find a set of videos about the same subject matter.

Watch this quick video to see more about uploading videos to Microsoft Stream

It is included as part of your school's Office 365 subscription

You've already got access to this great video sharing platform, so why not start making use of it today. Combine it with other Office 365 products such as PowerPoint for video creation, and OneNote, Sway or SharePoint for video distribution and sharing. The only caveat is that a couple of the advanced features you might read about, or see in some demo videos, namely facial recognition and the ability to search automatically generated transcriptions, are only available with the Education E5 subscription.

Learn More About Microsoft Stream

If you'd like to learn more about using Microsoft Stream, then head over to the official Microsoft Stream Website. Here you will find everything you need to know about uploading, finding, watching and sharing videos. As you'd expect there are some videos to watch, as well as a quick guided tour of the Microsoft Stream app.