Microsoft Stream claimed to be a "hidden gem"

While Microsoft tends to flail around in the consumer space they are pretty business savvy, and it seems they have high expectations for one of their newest enterprise services, Microsoft Stream.

The video hosting service for businesses is available 181 markets and 44 languages to Office 365 Enterprise customers and features many AI-driven features such as face detection for videos, letting users skip to a part of the video where a certain person is shown. The service also includes speech-to-text detection that automatically transcribes videos uploaded to Stream and the transcriptions are a lot more accurate than what you see on YouTube’s auto-generated captions.

On the security front, Microsoft says Stream includes “industry-leading” encryption and offers a range of different options to users in order to ensure video uploads are only viewable to the intended members of a company. Microsoft Stream also integrates with Azure Active Directory and Office Groups to make this a simpler process, and companies using Microsoft Teams will also be able to take advantage of the service thanks to the built-in integration.

On the Windows Weekly podcast Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela called Stream one of Microsoft’s unsung hero products and a “hidden gem,” calling it “YouTube but for inside your company.”

Anyone who worked on in a corporate context knows training videos are a major part of the induction and mandatory training experience, and with companies increasingly moving to off-site cloud services there is clearly a need for a secure hosting service for large videos.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley expects Microsoft to “promote the heck out of Stream this year” especially the searching capabilities which would allow users to search for specific parts of a  video which would contain the information and procedures they need right at that minute. This could also tie in with Cortana, which could suggest specific parts of a video to help you complete a task, or transcribe video of meetings.

See Microsoft’s video explaining the service below:

Microsoft Stream is available today to all users with an Office 365 Enterprise subscription, and you can check it out here.

via ONMSFT