Satya Nadella led software giant, Microsoft has announced Microsoft Stream, an innovative business video service that will allow businesses to share video internally. The video service aims to provide the same kind of tools and flexibility that YouTube offers to its consumers. This tool, of course, will come with added features such as extended security tools enterprises that one obtains from their document management services. Microsoft’s video sharing service is now available online as a free preview.

Microsoft Stream – For seamless corporate Broadcasts & more

The video service Stream will include features such as corporation-wide and livestreams, content-aware search, webinars as well as speech-to-text translation for businesses.

James Phillips, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its Business Intelligence Product Groups, chipped in a few words about Microsoft Stream. The service is quite easy to start, in fact, all one needs is an email address to get started. As for the user experience, Microsoft is taking cues from rivals like YouTube and Vimeo along with a few new social features such as comments, likes, and video recommendations.

Microsoft aims to deliver a unique and beautiful business experience. Some of the basic features of Stream can be used to include training and employee communication. Microsoft has previously offered a business video service before, known as Office 365 Video.

In an official announcement, Phillips writes Stream builds upon the success of Office 365 Video and over time the two experiences will mingle for seamless migration to provide a consistent experience.

The recently announced video service, Stream will leverage on Microsoft’s existing technologies to provide a seamless consumer-like experience to its enterprise clients. A lot of research is being done by the Azure Machine Learning teams by Microsoft Research to bring innovative features like automatic translation, speech-to-text, as well as support for face recognition. Sometime in the future, the research team may also work on adding features like live streaming.

The video service stream will treat every video like any other enterprise documents. For example, users will be able to assign rights to videos, remove access, set up access groups, and even make sure that the videos aren’t shared with any unknown party.

Developers can also use Microsoft Stream API to build new applications based on it. Since it’s in early stage, they’ll only be able to embed videos. However, as more new features are added to the API, it will get more interesting.

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