Based on Microsoft’s official documentation, on February 15, 2024 – Stream (Classic) will be fully retired & automatically disabled. Organizations that significantly relies on the Microsoft Stream for their video strategy, have already started making plans for transition.
The New Microsoft Stream is designed to be integrated with SharePoint and OneDrive. That means Stream is no longer a video portal and will be a stand-alone video platform. The New Stream will take advantage of SharePoint’s and OneDrive’s features. While preparing for the migration itself the videos can target either SharePoint Online sites or OneDrive. User content videos can move to OneDrive and group content videos can moves to SharePoint.
If we dive deep into the features of the new stream, we will realize that it will combine the advantages of SharePoint and MS stream. One is the simple-to-use and intelligent video experiences powered by Stream across Microsoft 365 platform. Another is the capability of SharePoint content services for control over portal experiences, sharing, compliance, and governance.
Even though this migration offers several SharePoint advantages, the developers that used the Graph API to incorporate SharePoint resources into their web application stand to gain the most from it. Since MS Stream doesn’t provide any API, there was no way we could get the video title and thumbnails to our websites. The benefit of moving to stream (on SharePoint) is that we can reuse the SharePoint Graph API features to take the data in the same way as any other SharePoint resources.
The “channel” concepts from the classic stream are one thing that is not available in the new stream. Videos can be gathered into channels and Microsoft 365 groups using Stream Classic. Since SharePoint groups its files into sites, libraries, and folders, these concepts are absent from the new Stream. The idea of channels may be replaced by something else in the future, but one suggestion would be to manage “Channels” as SharePoint “Sites.” As a result, we may create a SharePoint site for each channel and store the videos there.
In conclusion, there are differences between Stream Classic and Stream on SharePoint in terms of their features and functionalities. It makes complete sense that videos are now handled as a new document type in SharePoint rather than at a different location with a different layout and a different set of rights to manage.
