What is Microsoft Stream?

You may already be familiar with Microsoft Stream; if you are not yet familiar, this is a video-sharing service that is free to you as a member of the College and is part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite of tools. Storing videos on Microsoft Stream makes it very easy to share and embed videos within other tools in the Office 365 environment, such as SharePoint (The Hub), Teams, Yammer, and others.

In the Fall of 2021, Microsoft announced a new version of Microsoft Stream that is built on SharePoint. In doing so, they named their original version of Stream "Stream Classic" and the new version of Stream (uncreatively) "Stream on SharePoint". The table below outlines the key differences between the Classic version and the SharePoint version. 

How is Stream on SharePoint different from Stream Classic?

The biggest difference between Stream on SharePoint and Stream Classic is the way videos are stored once you upload them. 

Stream (Classic) is loosely connected to other Microsoft 365 apps and services, but videos are stored separately. You upload your videos, manage them there, then link to those videos in other places and applications. The videos uploaded to Stream Classic could not be managed the same way that your other files (documents, spreadsheets, slides, etc) could be in SharePoint and OneDrive, which means Stream Classic was particularly lacking in the domain of information protection and compliance. 

In Stream (on SharePoint), you upload videos the same way you upload any other file, and they're automatically stored within the SharePoint files platform. Also, they're processed much faster than they were in Stream Classic. Videos are played, enhanced, and edited by the newest version of the Stream web app and embeddable player. Moving forward, videos across Microsoft 365 (in SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, and Teams) will be considered Stream on SharePoint videos, which means you can set permissions on those video files and share them in all Microsoft 365 applications without losing those permission settings. For example, as seen in the screenshot below, I could upload a test.mp4 video to Microsoft Stream on SharePoint, and then within my personal OneDrive site (find yours at go.cofc.edu/onedrive), I could set that video to only be veiwable by faculty members using SharePoint's "Manage access" feature. Once I do that, those permissions will be maintained regardless of which Office 365 tool (Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, etc.) I use to share that video, meaning someone who is not a faculty member would not be able to view that video at all.