What is Microsoft Stream?

Is it intuitive enough for you and your staff to be able to use daily?

Clients and lots of my staff have asked me the same question…what the heck is Microsoft Stream?  My surface-level answer was Microsoft’s line – “Microsoft Stream is a corporate video-sharing service” like an internal company YouTube.  Well, the time has come for me to do some more testing with this application.  Turns out it is a nice addition to the Microsoft 365 world.  I have always known you can record Microsoft Teams meetings and calls into Microsoft Stream.  Stream’s transcription of these videos makes them easy to search for that little bit of information you need out of that one-hour long video.  Let’s start with some of those features below:

What does Transcription look like?

If you didn’t already know, the Teams meeting function has a button inside the application that allows you to record the meeting.  What’s fantastic about this, is once your call is recorded to Microsoft Stream and you specify the language.  It will run the transcription feature.  This is a fully transcribed call that can be searched.  When searching the transcription, you can then skip ahead to that section and watch the video.  TIt’s a fantastic feature for reviewing meetings for that time you mentioned that date you said you would have it done by…here are a few snapshots of the video transcription and how it shows results.

Below you can see the image for a searchable transcript:

Once you search you will see a list of results in your transcript.  Inside of there, you can skip to the video section to effectively access the part of the meeting you need at that moment. As you can see the word Microsoft was referenced several times in my search and I can jump ahead to those sections of the video.

You can add forms to solicit viewer feedback

Here you can see the addition of a form in the video at 2 seconds in.  Basically, a way to solicit input and feedback from users while watching a video.  So outside of just recording a meeting, you can upload a company video and solicit feedback from your team. You can specify the video at any point in the video.

The Good/Not as good

The Good:

  • Call Recording writes directly into Stream
  • You can build Channels for specific communication or integrate the Stream directly into an existing channel in Teams.
  • Searching a transcript of a video in my Microsoft Team is a useful feature when trying to parse a long video for a useful piece of information.
  • You can upload an existing video and the system will parse for transcription.  So, if you didn’t record the meeting via teams but have it in a different form you can upload it and the system will add the transcription.

The Not as Good:

  • Can’t share these videos publicly
  • The transcription still isn’t perfect

Microsoft Stream fits quite nicely nestled into the other Microsoft 365 apps. It integrates nicely if you are already using Microsoft Teams in your Organization.  The ability to record meetings, transcribe them and search them later takes the guessing game out of remembering important facts from meetings.  The ability to integrate forms into internal training videos to solicit input from watchers and keep them engaged is another nice feature.

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