9 ms·

Microsoft Stream

202 points by polskibus 10y ago

romanovcode 10y ago
What is the use case here?
- RoryH 10y ago
  It's Enterprise Youtube :-/
  - sjellis 10y ago
    It's not really enterprise unless it's hooked into a corporate authentication system with policy controls and management capabilities. I'm puzzled why this isn't attached to Office365 for those reasons. The marketing page for it says that it's for companies, but the whole thing makes my inner MS admin twitch: self-sign up with no mention of SSO, docs are pitched as if it's a consumer product with no administrative features. There's no fee or obvious cross-sell, which means that Microsoft are just burning money right now for no obvious gain, which is uncharacteristic of them - they usually provide free stuff that promotes actual paid-for products.
    - GFischer 10y ago
      Good points. I wonder about that as well (although as a user I hate all that stuff tied into Office365).
      - vsood 10y ago
        @GFischer, it's going to be available outside and with Office 365
    - ec109685 10y ago
      They have Office 365 Video for folks on that platform: https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/18/what-microsoft-stream-means-to-office-365 https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/18/what-microsoft-stream-me...
      - sjellis 10y ago
        Thanks, that clarifies it - they've hit some kind of wall with Office 365 Video, and are developing Stream to address that. Makes a lot more sense now.
    - ozmbie 10y ago
      Seems like they are following the ever so popular "lean startup" approach. They're announcing a small, separate product to validate if there is demand. Then they'll get early users and burn money while they figure out how to make it into a profitable business.
    - blahi 10y ago
      In what world do you live where this does not have AD?
    - vsood 10y ago
      Microsoft Stream leverages Azure Active Directory so it's tied to corp identity in a lot of cases.
    - vsood 10y ago
      Some more details here - https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and-office-365-video/ https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and...
- Delmania 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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/ )
- dugditches 10y ago
  The demand is there. Video content is 'difficult' for smaller to medium companies to manage and deliver. Some things are best taught through video. You may be thinking in just a sense of an office, but this could be useful for Factories or other slightly skilled labour. Add in basic messageboard/etc from a trusted brand, who most people already subscribe to with their OS and Software. However the 'anyone' can upload, seems like an HR disaster waiting. And I suspect will quickly be turned off to a limited few to the few that use this service.
eganist 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Understood, but that doesn't necessarily detract from the possibility that this is an adaptation of the underlying tech stack.
- Gaessaki 10y ago
  This is pure speculation, but I'm thinking they leveraged Azure Media Services[1] to deliver Stream, perhaps partially as a hero story for Azure. I feel like it's way too quick for them to have built an entire solution based off the Lynda stuff. I'm not even sure the companies are that integrated yet. [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/
  - NordSteve 10y ago
    I'm one of the Stream engineering managers. Our team also operates Azure Media Services (AMS) and Office 365 Video. Stream is built on AMS.
dorianm 10y ago
It seems like using unlisted videos with YouTube solves 99% of the use cases.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Unlisted videos aren't private, you also have a problem with the YT license.
- marxidad 10y ago
  Would uses cases that require corporate security account for only 1%?
  - dorianm 10y ago
    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
- sraje 10y ago
  unlisted videos just means that others can't search for them. If someone gets access to the URL, they can still view the video. Adding video permissions allows the video owners to ensure that people who shouldn't watch your videos can't.
- s3r3nity 10y ago
  Can you encrypt a Youtube channel? (I actually don't know...) Seems like this addresses a lot of security scenarios that Enterprise cares about.
DangerousPie 10y ago
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?
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  No reason a corporation's internal video repository couldn't have those things, if they're large enough.
- idm 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
idm 10y ago
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 10y ago
  "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 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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?
yAnonymous 10y ago
>I wanted greater privacy Yeah, Microsoft clearly is the way to go.
- sattoshi 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
- sctb 10y ago
  A substantive comment about security would be fine, but this isn't, so we've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12660741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12660741 and marked it off-topic.
CuGi 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
bnt 10y ago
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 :)
- Fogest 10y ago
  I sold my Surface Pro 3 because of the bad keyboard on it :P. Went with an ultrabook instead as I just used it for typing notes anyway.
- contextfree 10y ago
  you can use an SP4 keyboard with an SP3 (and vice versa I guess)
  - bnt 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
Roritharr 10y ago
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/
Koshkin 10y ago
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...
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  If anything, this should cut down on time for meetings if used properly. Plus there's no 2x speed button when you're meeting up in meatspace.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    Prediction: The speedup buttons will be globally configurable and will be promptly disabled by each company.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      Why? That makes no sense. It's still possible to pick up on information when watching many videos at x2 speed (or x1.5 speed). All you're achieving by disabling such features is making your employees less productive.
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
        Because we need people to pay attention and not fast forward through it. I'm not saying it's logical.
        ZenoArrow 10y ago
        Not all companies are run by narcissists.
        brazzledazzle 10y ago
cptskippy 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
olyjohn 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
thr0waway1239 10y ago
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
baldfat 10y ago
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.
mrmondo 10y ago
Is it a windows only, closed source, vendor lock-in thing or is the source available somewhere?
- vsood 10y ago
  It is a cloud based SaaS service. Nothing to do with Windows. It's a hosted offering.
zwieback 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
thesimpsons1022 10y ago
what about o365 video?
- vsood 10y ago
  https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and-office-365-video/ https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and... I am in the PM owner for both Stream and Office 365 Video
- ashishc 10y ago
  During preview, Microsoft Stream and Office 365 Video will co-exist. We will integrate Microsoft Stream into Office 365 to offer one video solution for businesses – whether they use Office 365 or not. See here for more details - https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and-office-365-video/ https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and...
maitrik 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Have you considered Vidyard or Wistia?
metaloha 10y ago
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 :(
smegel 10y ago
Why isn't it branded Skype?
gourneau 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! I have added this to our backlog via our feedback forum here: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Stream-Ideas/Attach-powerpoint-slides-to-video/idi-p/8520#M158 https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Stream-Ideas/Attach-powe...
VOYD 10y ago
very cool. You have to wonder how long it will be free, and what AI/ML is pulling from all that data.
srikz 10y ago
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
cosatelo 10y ago
I feel as if this would be excellent if executed by any other company like google

Microsoft Stream

202 points by polskibus 10y ago

romanovcode 10y ago

What is the use case here?

RoryH 10y ago
It's Enterprise Youtube :-/
- sjellis 10y ago
  It's not really enterprise unless it's hooked into a corporate authentication system with policy controls and management capabilities. I'm puzzled why this isn't attached to Office365 for those reasons. The marketing page for it says that it's for companies, but the whole thing makes my inner MS admin twitch: self-sign up with no mention of SSO, docs are pitched as if it's a consumer product with no administrative features. There's no fee or obvious cross-sell, which means that Microsoft are just burning money right now for no obvious gain, which is uncharacteristic of them - they usually provide free stuff that promotes actual paid-for products.
  - GFischer 10y ago
    Good points. I wonder about that as well (although as a user I hate all that stuff tied into Office365).
    - vsood 10y ago
      @GFischer, it's going to be available outside and with Office 365
  - ec109685 10y ago
    They have Office 365 Video for folks on that platform: https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/18/what-microsoft-stream-means-to-office-365 https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/18/what-microsoft-stream-me...
    - sjellis 10y ago
      Thanks, that clarifies it - they've hit some kind of wall with Office 365 Video, and are developing Stream to address that. Makes a lot more sense now.
  - ozmbie 10y ago
    Seems like they are following the ever so popular "lean startup" approach. They're announcing a small, separate product to validate if there is demand. Then they'll get early users and burn money while they figure out how to make it into a profitable business.
  - blahi 10y ago
    In what world do you live where this does not have AD?
  - vsood 10y ago
    Microsoft Stream leverages Azure Active Directory so it's tied to corp identity in a lot of cases.
  - vsood 10y ago
    Some more details here - https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and-office-365-video/ https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and...
Delmania 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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/ )
dugditches 10y ago
The demand is there. Video content is 'difficult' for smaller to medium companies to manage and deliver. Some things are best taught through video. You may be thinking in just a sense of an office, but this could be useful for Factories or other slightly skilled labour. Add in basic messageboard/etc from a trusted brand, who most people already subscribe to with their OS and Software. However the 'anyone' can upload, seems like an HR disaster waiting. And I suspect will quickly be turned off to a limited few to the few that use this service.

eganist 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Understood, but that doesn't necessarily detract from the possibility that this is an adaptation of the underlying tech stack.
Gaessaki 10y ago
This is pure speculation, but I'm thinking they leveraged Azure Media Services[1] to deliver Stream, perhaps partially as a hero story for Azure. I feel like it's way too quick for them to have built an entire solution based off the Lynda stuff. I'm not even sure the companies are that integrated yet. [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/
- NordSteve 10y ago
  I'm one of the Stream engineering managers. Our team also operates Azure Media Services (AMS) and Office 365 Video. Stream is built on AMS.

dorianm 10y ago

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

dogma1138 10y ago
Unlisted videos aren't private, you also have a problem with the YT license.
marxidad 10y ago
Would uses cases that require corporate security account for only 1%?
- dorianm 10y ago
  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
sraje 10y ago
unlisted videos just means that others can't search for them. If someone gets access to the URL, they can still view the video. Adding video permissions allows the video owners to ensure that people who shouldn't watch your videos can't.
s3r3nity 10y ago
Can you encrypt a Youtube channel? (I actually don't know...) Seems like this addresses a lot of security scenarios that Enterprise cares about.

DangerousPie 10y ago

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?

ceejayoz 10y ago
No reason a corporation's internal video repository couldn't have those things, if they're large enough.
idm 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

idm 10y ago

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 10y ago
"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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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?

yAnonymous 10y ago

>I wanted greater privacy Yeah, Microsoft clearly is the way to go.

sattoshi 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
sctb 10y ago
A substantive comment about security would be fine, but this isn't, so we've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12660741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12660741 and marked it off-topic.

CuGi 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

bnt 10y ago

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 :)

Fogest 10y ago
I sold my Surface Pro 3 because of the bad keyboard on it :P. Went with an ultrabook instead as I just used it for typing notes anyway.
contextfree 10y ago
you can use an SP4 keyboard with an SP3 (and vice versa I guess)
- bnt 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.

Roritharr 10y ago

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/

Koshkin 10y ago

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...

ZenoArrow 10y ago
If anything, this should cut down on time for meetings if used properly. Plus there's no 2x speed button when you're meeting up in meatspace.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  Prediction: The speedup buttons will be globally configurable and will be promptly disabled by each company.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    Why? That makes no sense. It's still possible to pick up on information when watching many videos at x2 speed (or x1.5 speed). All you're achieving by disabling such features is making your employees less productive.
    - brazzledazzle 10y ago
      Because we need people to pay attention and not fast forward through it. I'm not saying it's logical.
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        Not all companies are run by narcissists.
        brazzledazzle 10y ago

cptskippy 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

olyjohn 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

thr0waway1239 10y ago

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

baldfat 10y ago

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.

mrmondo 10y ago

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

vsood 10y ago
It is a cloud based SaaS service. Nothing to do with Windows. It's a hosted offering.

zwieback 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

thesimpsons1022 10y ago

what about o365 video?

vsood 10y ago
https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and-office-365-video/ https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and... I am in the PM owner for both Stream and Office 365 Video
ashishc 10y ago
During preview, Microsoft Stream and Office 365 Video will co-exist. We will integrate Microsoft Stream into Office 365 to offer one video solution for businesses – whether they use Office 365 or not. See here for more details - https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and-office-365-video/ https://stream.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-stream-and...

maitrik 10y ago

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 10y ago
Have you considered Vidyard or Wistia?

metaloha 10y ago

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 :(

smegel 10y ago

Why isn't it branded Skype?

gourneau 10y ago

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 10y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I have added this to our backlog via our feedback forum here: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Stream-Ideas/Attach-powerpoint-slides-to-video/idi-p/8520#M158 https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Stream-Ideas/Attach-powe...

VOYD 10y ago

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

srikz 10y ago

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

cosatelo 10y ago

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