Microsoft Launches YouTube-Like Stream Video Tool for Business
Sharing video at work is about to get a lot easier, thanks to Microsoft.
The software giant on Monday introduced Stream, a new tool that lets you upload, share, and discover videos in the workplace. Anyone with a business email address can sign up now; it's free during this preview period.
At this point, the service is pretty basic, letting you drag and drop videos you want to upload, then organize them into channels like you would on Slack. You can, for instance, create channels for specific teams, groups, or topics.
Microsoft said the videos will play on "any device, anytime," though you can manage who sees your content.
Follow specific channels you want to keep up with; once you do, videos placed there will show up in your Stream homepage. The service also uses machine learning to surface "trending" videos within your organization, and you can search by hashtag, most liked, and other filters.
Microsoft said it plans to eventually merge Stream with Office 365 video, though there's no word as to when that will happen. Redmond is also working on some handy features it plans to roll out in the future, including live-video streaming, the ability to search within a video (thanks to transcription and face-detection technologies), and IT management capabilities.
"We believe video is going to be truly transformative in the workplace," James Phillips, corporate vice president of Microsoft's business intelligence products group, wrote in a blog post. We see video being a core content type across all solutions we use at work today."
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.