Enhanced Video in Microsoft 365

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.

Stream-FEATURED.png

Microsoft Stream (on SharePoint) brings video into the flow of your everyday work so you can collaborate, build relationships, learn at your own pace, and catch up on what you missed with Teams meeting recordings. We’re excited to share news about features that will enhance playback, make it easy to find important content within videos, and help you make and share professional videos.

 

Video-first SharePoint pages

Today, the SharePoint team announced a broad set of creator updates including, new features to make video content shine better than ever on intranet pages. A newly updated Stream web part will display single and multiple videos on SharePoint pages with inline playback. Plus, new video-centric templates will ensure video content takes center stage. Whether you're showcasing a product demo, leadership update, or an event recording, the updated Stream web part will elevate your video content with transcripts, closed captions, search, chapters, and variable speed playback. Now it’s easier than ever to publish stunning video pages that captivate your audience. These capabilities will be rolled out over the next several months, ensuring that you have the tools you need to create compelling experiences for your viewers.

 

Picture3.png

The updated Stream web part displays single and multiple videos on SharePoint alongside other intranet content.

 

Communication site • Edit mode • Property pane.png

The new video page templates in SharePoint display video in a range of formats and gives viewers inline playback.


New in the Stream Web App

Currently, when you open a video in Microsoft 365, you’re taken to the Stream web app to view the video. The web app gives you enhanced playback that includes transcripts, captions, chapters, sharing, background noise suppression, variable speed playback and analytics. Soon the web app will have new capabilities allowing you to:


• Upload videos so you can add transcripts to them and easily share the videos across Microsoft 365 on Yammer, Viva or SharePoint pages.
• Choose where to store a video you’ve just created.
• Favorite a video you want to watch again.

 

Together these features give you control over where to store your videos and help you get to important content quickly. We expect all of these features to be available by June.

 

SWA-Mayrelease.png

The Stream web app for viewing, recording and sharing videos will soon let you upload and favorite content.


Recording Videos

With Stream you can record a video of yourself, or your screen, right from Stream.Office.com. Many people use Stream to record and share training videos, how-to content, product demonstrations, and project updates. To help you create videos with a polished, professional look we’ve added new tools you can use right in the flow of recording. Let’s take a look:

Custom backdrops: Replace your real-life background with a new backdrop or upload your own image to use as a backdrop. Additionally, you can set your screen as the backdrop so that viewers can see you and the information you’re speaking to at once.

 

ScreenRec.png

Add your screen as the backdrop to your video recording to create polished videos in Microsoft Stream.

 

Text, filters, stickers and inking: Make your videos more engaging and appealing by adding text, filters, stickers, and drawings. Text lets you highlight key points, filters help you adjust or correct the lighting, while stickers and drawings amp up personality of your video.

 

Text Stickers.png

 

Teleprompter: 

Have you tried the Stream teleprompter? It scrolls your talking points as you record so you can keep eye contact with your viewers without missing a beat. Stream’s teleprompter helps you to speak confidently and reduce the number of retakes in the video creation process.

 

Teleprompter.png

The Stream teleprompter scrolls your talking points as you record so you can keep eye contact with viewers and speak with confidence.

 

Faster video loading

We’ve recently made improvements to video playback that help to reduce buffering and video load video times. Our goal is to offer a smoother viewing experience with less time spent waiting for videos to play and fewer buffering pauses during playback on low-bandwidth connections.

 

Automatic transcript generation

We know that transcripts improve video productivity and captions enable accessibility for viewers of all abilities. Currently, when you want to add a transcript to a video in Stream, you need to manually create it by clicking the “Generate” button in the Stream video settings pane. Soon, transcripts will be generated automatically for all videos created in Stream. We expect automatic transcript generation to launch later this year.


Transcript and captions improvements

Transcripts make videos accessible for all viewers and give you a fast way to find information. We’re improving the transcript experience in a number of ways, including:


Automatic transcript generation: Currently transcripts can be generated on demand for Stream videos and are automatically generated for meeting recordings when admins have enabled Teams live transcription. Soon transcripts will be generated automatically for many other videos created in Stream. We expect automatic transcript generation to launch later this year.
Transcript search: You no longer need to scan a transcript to find content, now you can simply search the transcript for keywords. Clicking on the search results in the transcript will trigger the video to begin playing at the corresponding point.

 

People in transcripts: Currently when viewing the transcript of a Teams meeting recording you see the initials of the person who spoke. Starting this June, you’ll see their profile picture for easier identification of who said what in the meeting.

 

Transcript downloads: There are many reasons why you might want to download a copy of a transcript. But until now, you could only download the WebVTT format of the transcript which contains timecodes for every line of spoken text. Starting in June, you be able to download the transcript as a .docx file, giving you a nicely formatted document without timecodes.

 

Moveable captions: Captions are great…until they are blocking critical parts of the video. Beginning in May you’ll be able to move captions by dragging them to another area of the video. Simply click, hold, and move.

 

These transcript improvements will make it easier to find, use and consume information contained in a video. Learn more.

 

Choose only the files you want to migrate

To help IT admins migrate their organization’s content from Stream (Classic) to Stream (on SharePoint) in anticipation of our deprecation of Stream (Classic), we’re adding new capabilities to the migration tool. Beginning June 1st, admins can scan all Stream (Classic) content and then apply filters to choose which videos to migrate. Filters will include publish date, last viewed date, number of views and content type (‘Teams meeting Recording’, ‘Live event’ and ‘Video on demand’). Admins can save time and SharePoint storage by migrating only specific content. To access the migration tool sign into the Stream Admin Center. Navigate to Stream Migration > Migration tool. Learn more about migrating from Stream Classic to Stream (on SharePoint). Note the migration tool is not yet available to GCC customers.


Taken together, these many new Stream (on SharePoint) features help you to better create, share and use video across Microsoft 365.


Feedback

We welcome your feedback. Feel free to comment below or share and vote on ideas in the Stream feedback portal. Additionally, we’d like to invite you to join our customer connections office hours. In this twice-monthly meeting, we answer your questions, share our plans, learn more about your video needs, and get your feedback. Sign up at aka.ms/StreamConnect.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.