Microsoft Stream is a video sharing service that is included with our Office 365 license. It is available to all faculty, staff and students at the University of Windsor. Microsoft Stream is a private sharing service that requires a UWin Account, so it is ideal in cases where you only want to share your video content with people at UWindsor, for example lecture records, student projects, or training videos. You can control who (users or groups) have access to the videos that you upload.
Accessing Stream
Stream can be accessed from a Web browser at https://web.microsoftstream.com or at https://portal.office.com and selecting it from the apps menu (click on the nine dots in the upper left corner, choose "All Apps.." and find it in the menu. It will be added to your frequently used apps listing.
You can also download and install the mobile app for Apple iOS or Android.
Features
Microsoft Stream provides these important features:
- Free of advertising and commercial tracking
- Automatic captioning of the video
- Per-user or group access, including the ability to let others upload a new version
- Transcription search
- Channels for grouping videos together
- Comments (can be disabled)
Introduction to Stream
Limiting Access and Organizing Videos
Groups
Groups are a set of users that are used to limit access to resources. Groups in Stream are Office 365 groups. If you need a new group created to limit Stream video permissions, and there is no existing Office 365 group that can be used for that, fill out a service request. Each group as one or more owners, and the group owner has some ability to modify Stream settings and manage channels that are created within the group (see section on Stream group ownership).
To see the groups that you belong to, open the My Content menu, and select Groups.
The groups will be displayed in tiles and you can see the total number of videos and channels in each group.
Stream groups are Office 365 groups. Change made in Stream will affect the underlying Office 365 groups. If you add a member to the Stream group, you are also adding them to the Office 365 group and it will give them access to group resource such as OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint, as well as Stream.
If you are the group owner, you will see the option to delete the Group. If you delete the group in Stream, it will also delete the group in Office 365 and any associated team. Do not delete the group in Stream. Do not change the Access setting on a group.
The only option you should be setting is the “Allow all members to contribute”. The group owner can select the tree-dots menu in the group listing and select Edit. When this setting is on, then any member of the group can contribute videos in that group and it’s associated channels.Following for Notifications
Channels
Channels are an organization method for videos, but not a permission method. Channels don’t have permissions on their own. If you create a channel under a group, it is the group that limits access, and the channel that provides organization. A single video can be stored in more than one channel. If you follow a channel, you will get notifications when new videos are added to it.
Guest Access
Anonymous access to videos published in Stream is currently not possible. Only people with an active UWin Account can be granted access. To grant access to someone who does not have an active UWin Account, you will need to request and sponsor a guest UWin Account using this online form: https://userid.net.uwindsor.ca/m/sponsor_uwinid/sponsor_id
Company-Wide Channels
Any Stream user can add videos to a company-wide channel. If you need a channel were any member of the UWindsor community can add, please enter a service request. Only videos with permissions “Allow everyone in your company to view” can be added to a company-wide channel.
Additional Information
Transcription and Captions
Microsoft Stream will automatically create captions (transcript) of a video when it is uploaded. It may take several minutes or hours to generate the transcript. When it is available, users will be able to see the transcript in separate window, or view them as captions, and the transcript will be used for searching in Stream and Office 365.
The owner of the video can edit any errors in the transcript simply by pressing the pencil icon in the upper right corner of the transcript window.
In case the transcript has not appeared, edit the video details and make sure that:
- The Video Language is set appropriately
- Autogenerate caption file is checked
Caption File Extract
Microsoft Stream automatically generates a WebVTT file from what was spoken in a video and uses it for a video's transcript and closed captions. If you download the caption file, it will contain time codes and meta data.
At times you may want to get a copy of a video's transcript without the extra information, and perhaps publish it as meeting notes, etc.
This on-line utility will extract the transcript text from downloaded VTT files generated by Microsoft Stream allowing you to copy and paste the text elsewhere.