The Ultimate Guide To Microsoft Stream App

12 min readJan 25, 2021

This is a complete guide to Microsoft Stream App.

If you are looking to learn Microsoft Stream, you’ll love this new guide.

Let’s jump right in.

What is Microsoft Stream?

Microsoft Stream App is a new service which Microsoft has added into their Office 365 Suite. It provides a way to share videos within institutions. Similar to how you can use OneDrive or SharePoint to give certain people access to certain files, Stream lets you create, share, like, and comment on videos that are trending within an organization. Videos are organized by “channel” so you can keep track of videos by the topic of the channel.

Channels and Groups

Channels and groups are two important terms to understand in the context of Microsoft Stream.

Channels

Channels in Microsoft Stream are different than channels on YouTube or other streaming services. Each channel is run by the designated “owner(s)” of the group, who can control who can contribute to the channel. In this way, a channel can have many contributors who are also the viewers. Additionally, groups can have multiple channels.

Groups

Groups are simpler to understand; a group is a group of users in a team that is stored with its own identifying name. For example, all science professors might be stored in a group called Science Professors, which has subgroups Chemistry Professors, Biology Professors, etc. Students are stored in class groups (Class A, Class B, etc.) and might also be part of groups for extracurricular activities.
There is no limit on how many groups one user can be a part of. Groups are created by IT on request (for student groups this must come from the faculty advisor). Groups can be public or private. Public groups can be joined by anyone within the organization without approval from the group’s owner.
Private groups are more heavily moderated by the owner and the activity of these groups are invisible to non-members.

Microsoft Stream Login

Microsoft Stream can be accessed in three ways.

Access through your Office365 Portal

On your Office365 home page, click the 3×3 square of dots in the upper left-hand corner.
Click All Apps.
Click on the Stream button with the red icon.

Access through web Microsoft stream

Enter web.microsoftstream.com in the address bar of your preferred browser.
Click Sign In and use your email and password.

Mobile access through the Microsoft Stream app

Microsoft Stream is available for iOS 11+
Microsoft Stream is available for Android 5.0+

What can it be used for?

Microsoft Stream can be used to share content, ideas, and announcements between different people and groups. A public group might create a channel that is visible to all members of a team but can only be added to by owners of the group. In this way, they can make video announcements that are available for anyone to see without giving everyone access to the channel.
However, if they also want a channel where anyone can use video to suggest ideas, they can create a second channel that anyone can contribute to and encourage students to share their ideas and experiences.
More pressingly, professors can create private channels for each of their classes and upload videos of them lecturing or talking along with a PowerPoint presentation.
Students can make comments at certain timestamps in the video to ask questions or give responses. Students can also upload videos to the private channel if the professor allows it to get peer feedback on presentations or upload videos personally which can be shared with just the professor if peer feedback is not desired.

Creating a channel

From the Microsoft Stream home page, click on “Create” in the toolbar across the top, then click on “Channel” in the menu that opens.

In the “Create a channel” dialogue enter your channel name, description (optional), channel access, group, and custom channel image (optional).
Channel access controls who can view your channel, but not who can contribute.
Your channel is now created. Before uploading videos, you will have to read and accept organization’s policy on data collection.

Uploading a video to a channel

Open the page for the channel you want to upload to through searching or other means.
Drag files from a folder over the browser window to upload them, or click “select more files” to open a window where you can select one or multiple files to upload from your computer.
Stream supports all commonly used video formats.
Follows steps 4–6 of Uploading a video personally below to set name, descriptions, access, and other options.

Uploading a video personally

From the Microsoft Stream home page, click on “Create” in the toolbar at the top, then click on “Upload video” from the menu that pops up.

Once the next screen loads, you can either drag files over the browser or click “browse” to upload videos, similar to uploading to a channel. Stream supports all commonly used video formats.
If desired, set the default language of the video so that captions can automatically be generated.
In the Details section, you can set the name of the video, add a description, set a thumbnail, and change the language you previously selected.

In the Permissions section, you can change who can view your video. Checking “Allow everyone in your company to view this video” will let anyone in your organization find and view your video, even if it is not specifically shared with them. From the “Share with” section, you can share with any combination of groups, channels, and people.

In the Options section, you can set more preferences for your video.
People will create a timeline of when different people are in the video. Comments allow or disable commenting on your video. Captions and Subtitles let you autogenerate captions or upload a subtitle file.

Click Publish.

Creating a live event

Live events can be used to broadcast meetings, lectures, presentations, announcements and more.

From the Microsoft Stream home page, click on “Create” in the toolbar at the top, then click on “Live event” from the menu that pops up.
In the “Event setup” page you can name your event, add a description, thumbnail, and set a time for the event.
Events can be scheduled in advance (i.e., live video will start automatically at 2:30 PM today) or set to start as soon as the setup is completed.

The Permissions section for live events is the same as the Permissions section for videos you personally upload.
You can decide whether to allow everyone in your company (Techieberry) access to the video or only specific groups you decide on. See step 5 of Uploading a video personally above for more info and a screenshot.
The Options section for live events is almost the same as the Options section for videos you personally upload.
You can control whether Stream will track people in the video, allow comments, or automatically generate captions.
Additionally, you can decide whether Stream will record the broadcast for people to watch at a later date and set a custom message for the end of the event if desired. See step 6 of Uploading a video personally above for more info and a screenshot.
Press Publish to save your event or start your broadcast.

Sharing videos

From the Microsoft Stream home page, click on “My content” in the toolbar at the top of the screen, then “Videos” in the menu that pops up.
Find the video you want to share and click on the three dots at the far right, then on “Share”.

From here you can generate a link to share with peers within your company.
IMPORTANT: This does not override the people/groups/channels specified as having access when the video was uploaded and it does not let people outside of your organization view it. If you are the owner and want to change which groups have access to the video, click “Close” on this dialogue, click on the pencil icon next to the three dots, and follow step 5 of “Uploading a video personally” above.

The “Embed” option in sharing will not be used by the majority of users, but it gives you HTML to embed the video in your own webpage if you so desire.

How to share Microsoft stream video with an external user?

Unfortunately, Stream can’t currently share videos to either specifically named external users or as an anonymous link for anyone to watch. Even Microsoft Teams guest users can’t access stream recordings. If you need to share, you could use the alternative of downloading the recording and then use any one of the file transfer solutions (SharePoint, sFTP, Box) to transfer the recording to an external party.

How to download a video from Microsoft stream?

Recording owners can download and distribute their meeting recordings.

In Teams, go to the meeting recording in the chat history and click more options (…) > Open in Microsoft Stream.
In the Microsoft Stream portal, under the video, click on options (…) > Download original video.

How to delete recording in Microsoft Stream App?

Recording owners (either the person who started the recording, or any additional owners named by that person) are the only people who can delete recordings.

In the Microsoft Stream portal, under the video, click on options (…) > Delete.

How to recover your deleted videos?

When videos are deleted in Microsoft Stream they go into a 30 day recycle bin.

The video recycle bin allows you to restore videos if they were accidentally deleted or to permanently delete videos already in the recycle bin before the 30-day limit. If no action is taken 30 days after videos are deleted they will automatically be purged from the recycle bin and permanently deleted.

When viewing your recycle bin you will see all videos that you are an owner of, even if you didn’t delete the video.

To get to your recycle bin, go to My content > Recycle bin.

Click the Restore icon to restore a video and undelete it. When a video is restored from the recycle bin its permissions, links to groups, and channels, and information about the video will be restored as well.
Or click the Delete icon to remove the video from the recycle bin and permanently delete it.

If you trim the team recording within Microsoft Stream, the trimmed portions of the video are permanently removed, so the original video cannot be recovered. For more information, check Trim a video in Microsoft Stream. As a workaround, when you trim any meeting recording in Stream, first download the video as a backup to prevent data loss.

Microsoft Stream App Recording Compliance

Microsoft Stream now logs user activity like viewing, uploading, downloading and sharing videos, as well as an administrative activity like changing settings for auditing purposes. The audit logs can be viewed in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Portal, with additional tools to search by user, date, and type of activity or for advanced scenarios and automation, the same audit logs can be accessed with PowerShell commands and APIs.

To learn more and get started on how to access Microsoft Stream audit logs and details on what events are being logged, please visit Audit Logs in Microsoft Stream.

Microsoft Stream App Transcription

The Allow Transcript should be enabled in a tenant to edit transcripts and only the owner who initiated the recording can perform the task.

TeamsAdminCenter-> Meetings-> meeting policies-> Global( Org-Wide Default)

From the meeting recording available Teams chat -> Click on More options (…) and Select Open in Microsoft Stream.

Now from the Stream portal-> Navigate to My Content->Videos-> Select the Video->Update Video Details.

Under Options -> Captions-> Select Download file

Now edit the Downloaded File by launching it using Notepad Application. We added a New Text called let’s stop it now

Upload the file which has been modified, Please uncheck the option Autogenerate a caption file.

General navigation from the homepage

The home page for Microsoft Stream shows trending videos and channels and the toolbar used for navigation.

Toolbar

• Home — return to the homepage of Stream
• Discover
o Videos — shows current popular videos within your organization, and lets you search for specific videos
o Channels — shows channels in your company and lets you search for specific channels
o People — lets you search for people within a tenant. You can see videos they’ve uploaded and channels they’re part of.
o Groups — shows all private groups you are a member of and all public groups in your organization. You can see how many channels and videos each group has.

• My content
o Videos — Shows all videos you have uploaded and gives options for customization on each of them.
o Groups — Shows all groups you are a member of and the number of channels and videos they each have.
o Channels — Shows all channels you are part of.
o Meetings — Shows all stored recording of meetings you were a part of.
o Watchlist — Shows all videos you have stored to your watchlist.
o Followed channels — Shows all channels you are following.
o Recycle bin — Shows all videos and drafts of videos you have recently deleted. They are stored here for 30 days and then deleted automatically.

• Create
o Upload video — Covered in “Uploading a video personally” above
o Live event — Covered in “Creating a live event” above
o Channel — Covered in “Creating a channel” above

• Search — A search bar to let you search for channels, videos, people, or groups. Brings you to the Discover tab after you search initially.

Supported File Formats

FLV (.flv)
MXF (.mxf)
GXF (.gxf)
MPEG2-PS, MPEG2-TS, 3GP (.ts, .ps, .3gp, .3gpp, .mpg)
Windows Media Video (WMV)/ASF (.wmv, .asf)
AVI (.avi)
MP4/ISMV (.mp4, .m4a, .m4v, .isma, .ismv)
Microsoft Digital Video Recording (DVR-MS) (.dvr-ms)
Matroska/WebM (.mkv)
WAVE/WAV (.wav)
QuickTime (.mov)

Microsoft Stream Benefits

With Microsoft Stream, users can like, comment, or share a video uploaded on Stream.
Offers incredible storage space where users can upload up to 100,000 videos up to 50GBs each.
Users can control with whom they share the video and organize videos into the logical container, all because Stream falls under Microsoft’s security umbrella.
It integrates well with other Microsoft Online programs like SharePoint and Yammer. So, if you have a group of Share Point developers that hold a training session on Microsoft, you can directly share it on Sharepoint or Yammer.
A welcome Video from CEO of your company can be shared on the company’s website, and when a new employee joins, he has to visit the site to understand the culture and policies of the organization.
Stream allows anyone following the user’s channel to get updates when a new video is posted.
Users can also ascertain whom they would like to allow to add and remove videos from a channel and what access rights needs to be given.
Users can control whether a group channel is viewed publicly or only as a private group.
User can limit access and can protect sensitive content as and when needed. User can control who can edit a video and which groups or channels it can be displayed.
Users can search a video from its title or description or the actual word content of the video.
The users, when editing the video uploaded by them, the user can add subtitles or captions during or after the upload. There is also a feature in Stream, where the users can make use of the automatically generated captions through Automatic Speech Recognition technology. The captions too are editable.
Stream allows videos to be uploaded in most file formats and can be viewed on all devices from anywhere, anytime.
Before you head start with Stream, make sure that you create guidelines for the employees on how to use Stream.
As an organization, you can make your company guidelines available to be read and acknowledged by your staff before they upload their first video to Microsoft Stream.

Some businesses are yet to tap the benefits of video, but as the technology is advancing, it has become mandatory for companies to harness the importance of videos for their business. Microsoft, with its video streaming software, Microsoft Stream has offered a great solution to share, upload, manage, and connect with co-workers using videos.