
Microsoft Stream - polskibus
https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/
======
idm
This is going to be huge. 10 years ago, I would never have thought that
technology alone sufficiently differentiated YouTube from "long tail"
offerings like Vevo or Twitch. It turns out you can have multiple, multiple-
billion-dollar businesses using essentially the same platform. The use cases
inherent to various content niches inform new user interfaces and modes of
interacting with the underlying video data.

Enterprise Video is a huge content niche. I've used YouTube in the past for
business videos, but it was awkward. I wanted greater privacy, which YouTube
does not really offer, because these videos discussed pre-launch ideas. We
already used Office 365, so Microsoft Stream would have been a no-brainer.

I would love to perform research with the MS Stream platform, too. By focusing
on the niche of business, Stream is creating interesting audience dynamics
that will be quite different from the "grazing" model of recreational video
watching. This is relevant to my interests.

~~~
wastedhours
"Enterprise Video is a huge content niche." \- most definitely, almost this
exact same thing is in my ideas notebook (as I'm sure it is for many people),
especially with Office 365 integration.

There's going to be a whole ecosystem around more internal video production,
webinars and training sessions going forwards. Going to be a really nice
niche.

~~~
Angostura
I have the need to produce internal webinars for a reasonably sized
organisation. It will be interesting to see if they add live streaming, the
ability to have real-time text chat and screensharing.

Its slightly odd that a product called Stream doesn't actually 'stream' \-
though I understand that they are using th eterm in a different way here.

For the moment, I'll stick with Youtube Live.

~~~
wastedhours
Now that would be very useful - screensharing, and Powerpoint slide switching
integration would be the winner for me too. Webinars are a really interesting
area - how much time do you dedicate to them if you don't mind me asking?

~~~
Angostura
At the moment - none at all, we're in the process of setting everything up.
But we're going to have one scheduled for every two months, lasting an hour.
These won't be purely for internal consumption however, they will be for
training at partner organisations.

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cptskippy
I work on enterprise video for a number of years and the biggest problem isn't
a delivery platform, it's infrastructure being ill suited for video.

A lot of enterprises are setup with a Spoke-Hub topology where all network
data passes through the hub. Sometimes this is done for auditing purposes, and
other times it's for security. Sometimes remote offices do not have internet
access despite an internet connection. Their edge routers just use a VPN
tunnel or MPLS network back into the hub.

In the end it's no distribution that kills but bandwidth. That why peer-to-
peer video and multicasting are still around. Because in a lot of cases you
can have one person browsing Youtube or watching a webcast from his desk and
it will completely saturate the office data line.

~~~
yairharel
Good point. Microsoft clearly got the memo. I work for a peer-to-peer video
delivery provider (Kollective) and we partner with Microsoft to scale video
delivery on enterprise networks.

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Koshkin
Maybe things aren't as bad as I imagine them to be, but my immediate reaction
to this was that now instead of working we are all going to be required to
spend time watching "enterprise" videos - as if countless hours being wasted
in senseless meetings watching someone's latest PowerPoint creation is not
enough. Way to go, coders, way to go...

~~~
robotresearcher
Ah, corporate training videos. It's what Netlflix in another tab was invented
for.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
These are mostly CYA for the company, they don't really care if you don't,
they just want to show compliance when something goes wrong...

~~~
toyg
You'd be surprised. The CYA stuff is what you are _forced_ to see, but there
are tons and tons of videos (on this or that esoteric platform) that almost
nobody will ever watch, but provide an ego-stroke (and sometimes a job
justification) for this or that middle manager.

Enterprise video is always, _always_ made for the benefit of the broadcaster
(i.e. management), _never_ for actual workers. Which is why no-one (except
management) cares about enterprise video, it's possibly the worst tool for
internal training or knowledge sharing.

~~~
true_religion
At a lot of workplaces, there are internal conferences and seminars about all
sorts of things. Usually they'll tap on a member of a particular team, and
have them give a presentation. Due to the fact that it's about internal code,
it won't be applicable to host it on Youtube publicly, so it can just end up
being dumped into the company storage servers somewhere.

This would be a good use case: sharing video about company-private materials.

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DangerousPie
Was anybody else a bit confused by how the page says "The content you want,
and nothing else - Create a secure, encrypted video site with no ads and no
unrelated videos to distract people—and no headaches for your IT department."
and right next to it they show a screenshot of a page with "Trending Videos"
and "Popular Channels"? Isn't that pretty much the opposite of what they
should be showing there?

~~~
idm
I think they are demonstrating discovery within-company. That feature will be
huge. It potentially eliminates meetings that would have had to occur "between
silos" \- which are extremely difficult meetings to begin with.

If somebody from team A (on campus 1) can watch a video from team C (on campus
3) without needing their team leaders to coordinate a meeting, this will be
extremely valuable to businesses.

But why would team A ever find out about team C? That's where this discovery
feature comes in. See what's trending within-company.

~~~
brazzledazzle
Then managers tell their employees to watch a video to influence the trending
status and it just becomes another internal propaganda tool. Seen it with
internal like buttons and comment sections time and time again.

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zwieback
Instead of YouTube-Enterprise it would be nice to have a way to produce better
video. I find it hard to sit through poorly produced and horribly narrated
videos, some kind of hosted production service that helps make better videos
would be really useful. Coach the user to get better lighting, sound and
tighter editing.

~~~
s3r3nity
I agree - but you want to first make a smooth + easy to use platform to
encourage the user to stick around for that coaching. Otherwise, I'll just
find the whole experience burdensome.

Hopefully your recommendation is on MSFT's roadmap.

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gourneau
This is great for organizations that are already using office 365. We have
been recording lots of presentations, and this is a prefect place to put them.

If there are any Stream folks reading this my one request is an easy way to
attach a slide deck to the videos. The video description is an okay place, but
it would be even better if there was deeper integration. Like slides on one
side of the screen.

~~~
yayadarsh
Thanks for the feedback! I have added this to our backlog via our feedback
forum here: [https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Stream-Ideas/Attach-
powe...](https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Stream-Ideas/Attach-powerpoint-
slides-to-video/idi-p/8520#M158)

------
metaloha
Oh man this hurts. I worked with a company several years ago to bring an
"enterprise youtube" to market, but it was only ever marketed to pyramid-style
corporations as a sales training tool. I believe it's still in use by a few
hundred thousand employees, but as far as I know it's still just being
artificially restricted to those types of businesses :(

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Roritharr
This desperately needs the functionality of Slidepresenter[1], then it would
be amazing. Without the option to more easily add more information to the
videos, put them next to more context, this could fizzle into a dump for low
quality "memos".

[1][http://www.slidepresenter.com/en/](http://www.slidepresenter.com/en/)

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eganist
Microsoft bought LinkedIn this year, and LinkedIn bought Lynda last year
([https://www.lynda.com/press/pressrelease?id=4563](https://www.lynda.com/press/pressrelease?id=4563)),
though the Microsoft transaction seems like it's still in flight.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is a simple whitelabeling of Lynda (or perhaps
adaptation to a slightly tweaked use case -- this doesn't seem focused
specifically on organizational eLearning) since Lynda hasn't been discontinued
as a service, but that's just off of my quick 30 second glance. Stream and
Lynda look like they both do pretty much the same thing, so Microsoft might be
capitalizing on its own brand recognition to sell the underlying service to
Microsoft shops.

I'm purely speculating, though. Is there anyone on the Stream team who can
comment?

~~~
Delmania
Lynda provides a place for authors to upload training videos that can be
accessed through a subscription. They are then paid royalties every time
someone accesses the video. (At least, that's how Pluralsight works).

Stream allows companies to produce their own videos, for HR, training, and
motivational purposes, and host it. Think of it as an internal YouTube.

~~~
eganist
Understood, but that doesn't necessarily detract from the possibility that
this is an adaptation of the underlying tech stack.

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bnt
It would be great if they used the Surface Pro 4 on the marketing page, not
SP3. The keyboard on the SP4 is lightyears better :)

~~~
contextfree
you can use an SP4 keyboard with an SP3 (and vice versa I guess)

~~~
bnt
Definitely, and some reviewers went as far to say that you can just buy the
SP4 TypeCover and keep on using your SP3. Didn't work out well for me though,
my SP3 was buggy as hell (wifi issues, couldn't wake up from sleep etc).

~~~
srikz
There were a ton of firmware issues earlier. They have been (mostly) ironed
out now. It was baffling when SP4 launched with so many issues. You'd expect
that they would have learnt a lot from fixing the issues on SP3.

OT: Let's see how they fare with the SP5. I hope they upgrade the Surface 3
this time.

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maitrik
Wow we were just looking for something like this that was accessible and easy.
Will definitely give this a shot.

Best bet for us till now used to be Vimeo.

~~~
inthewoods
Have you considered Vidyard or Wistia?

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dorianm
It seems like using unlisted videos with YouTube solves 99% of the use cases.

~~~
marxidad
Would uses cases that require corporate security account for only 1%?

~~~
dorianm
And for those use cases, you can have specific permissions with Google apps:
[http://i.imgur.com/NJPZ7Fa.png](http://i.imgur.com/NJPZ7Fa.png)

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thr0waway1239
For everyone worried about software jobs going away, this is a good example of
something which will create new jobs. Soon, some of us will be spending our
time investigating why the green YouTubes [1] "is down for some reason" :-)

[1] [https://vimeo.com/47311461#t=17m0s](https://vimeo.com/47311461#t=17m0s)

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CuGi
Although this looks cool, i don't know how well it would last.

I guess my issue is that i don't understand how this would scale.

There is not going to be a massive amount of customers for a specialized
enterprise video platform, and there's already video support in Sharepoint?

That would make pricing tricky, since this is essentially a single feature?

~~~
bryanlw
I heard Stream and O365 Video will converge and Stream will also stand alone
pricing too. So you can get Stream through office, or if you don't want to pay
office you can pay Stream alone.

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baldfat
This is absolutly what I have been look for at my company. We are a non-profit
educational company and training happens 90% during the start of the year. We
need a way to gather ideas and present them to others in our company at our
60+ locations.

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srikz
I always thought PowerPoint was going to evolve into a hybrid video-
presentation platform. Something which would include narration, more fluid and
complex transitions / animations along with the ability to jump to specific
points in the presentation. Maybe Stream can bring such features to PowerPoint
in Office 365

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romanovcode
What is the use case here?

~~~
Delmania
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.

~~~
GFischer
The company I work for also had this problem, and solved it by using a third
party provider (Absorb LM -
[https://www.absorblms.com/](https://www.absorblms.com/) )

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cosatelo
I feel as if this would be excellent if executed by any other company like
google

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olyjohn
A little late to the game, IMO. Solutions like Kaltura have been around for
years. There are ton of "enterprise" video offerings on the market that do all
these things... But I guess it doesn't matter, Microsoft just making a product
will get it adopted no matter if it's actually good or not. Hopefully it's not
as terrible as Sharepoint.

~~~
bryanlw
Kaltura has been around for years and they are a very mature product. However,
what makes Microsoft Stream more competitive is the future integration with
Office and other Microsoft platforms.

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VOYD
very cool. You have to wonder how long it will be free, and what AI/ML is
pulling from all that data.

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smegel
Why isn't it branded Skype?

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thesimpsons1022
what about o365 video?

~~~
vsood
[https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-
and...](https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and-
office-365-video/)

I am in the PM owner for both Stream and Office 365 Video

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yAnonymous
>I wanted greater privacy

Yeah, Microsoft clearly is the way to go.

~~~
sattoshi
Snarky comments aside, Microsoft was always targetting entreprises, think
office365.

Windows botnet is somethijg completely seperate. They don't care about
entreprises there, they only want data.

Do not conflate these two.

Google is 100% data, Microsoft is maybe 50.

~~~
nickfromseattle
To be fair, although many enterprise organizations use O365, the average
customer size is quite small and reflects the fact that most businesses are
SMB.

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mrmondo
Is it a windows only, closed source, vendor lock-in thing or is the source
available somewhere?

~~~
vsood
It is a cloud based SaaS service. Nothing to do with Windows. It's a hosted
offering.

