Microsoft Stream: YouTube for the Business World
YouTube is an excellent platform for streaming and sharing videos to the masses. However, sometimes you don’t want to make your videos public. Contents such as internal memos or training broadcasts are better restricted to members of your organization. Well, Microsoft has an app for this — it’s called Stream.
Your business is a community that survives on the sharing of information. You need to sustain efficient collaboration on ideas, stories, and data between your employees. There’s no better way to achieve this than Microsoft Stream.
Let TLC Tech give you some perspective on this emerging technology and why it’s suitable for your Sacramento organization.
What’s Microsoft Stream?
It’s a tool within Microsoft 365 that allows you to upload, organize, broadcast, and exchange video content with other users in your organization. Microsoft Stream is also available as a stand-alone enterprise solution for those who do not use Office 365.
The platform is designed for collaboration. It makes it easy to integrate video content into Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and other apps that you use every day. Anybody within your organization can add a video to your Microsoft Streams site following simple and straightforward steps. All they have to do is:
- Add a description to the video and a hashtag if applicable.
- Select the users allowed to see it.
- Publish the video.
Popular or trending videos are served on every user’s personalized homepage, along with the channels they have created. This makes it easy to access relevant content promptly. Stream also allows you to like or share videos with others.
Getting Started With Microsoft Stream
All you need is a corporate/school email and access to Microsoft Stream.
- Open your browser and navigate through the Office 365 tab to find Stream. If you cannot see it, click on the Add (+) icon to include it on your homepage.
- On selecting stream, you will be automatically redirected to the Microsoft Stream’s website. At the top, you will see four control buttons:
- Discover: This is where you can find videos shared by other people within your organization. Note that the source must make the video accessible to you or a group/channel you belong to see it. You can sort them out based on individual videos, groups, people, or channels.
- My Content: Just as the name suggests, clicking this icon takes you to videos that you’ve posted before. You can always review the privacy settings to make your content available to more or fewer people.
- Create: This is the control button for creating or sharing new video content.
- Search: The platform has a powerful search engine that allows you to browse individual videos by name or groups.
Why Microsoft Stream?
- It Allows You to Share Content Within Your Organization Privately: The platform is ideal for sharing sensitive company information or training videos that you don’t want on YouTube. You can even further restrict access to individual viewers or groups (channels) based on relevance.
- It Provides a Neat Search Facility That Loads Better Than YouTube: Stream adds intelligence to how your users engage with content. Speech within the video is automatically transcribed. This not only enhances accessibility but also enables deep search within the videos. It also has a reliable facial detection capability that helps you visualize where each person is in the video. You can then jump to the exact moment that’s important to you by just clicking on the speaker’s timeline. The transcription feature is, however, only available if you have a full Microsoft 365 license.
- You Can Share Individual Videos With Microsoft Teams, provided that you have the same Microsoft 365 account. This productive cross-platform function is familiar to most of the 365 apps.
Microsoft Stream is not a substitute for your YouTube channel. You can have both platforms at the same time and use them for different reasons. YouTube is public-facing and is an ideal marketing platform, while Microsoft Stream is more inward-facing and suitable for in-house correspondence and training.
Do you have any queries on getting the best of Microsoft Stream? TLC Tech is here to help — we provide comprehensive IT solutions to organizations and businesses across Sacramento.
