[ #Office365 ] Video portal FAQ

Here is my first two articles on this topic :

• [ #Office365 ] Video portal is there and why this is important !
• [ #Office365 ] Video user experience and technical stuff

In this third article, I wanted to answer some frequently asked questions, I have seen so far.

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1. Where is the documentation ?

To go deeply in this subject, you can find here the documentation :

• Find help about Office 365 Video with 4 interesting articles
  • Meet Office 365 Video
  • Create and manage a channel in Office 365 Video
  • Manage your Office 365 Video portal
  • Video formats that work in Office 365 Video

 

 

2. Which Office 365 plans are required to get Office 365 Video?

Applies To: Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E2, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E4, Office 365 Education A2, Office 365 Education A3, Office 365 Education A4

So be aware that at this time, this is an Enterpise only offering.

3. Which video formats are supported ?

Office 365 Video is built on Azure Media Services. Therefore, Office 365 Video supports only the codecs and file formats that Azure Media Services supports.

You can find a list here : Video formats that work in Office 365 Video

4. Where can I ask and vote for new functionalities ?

There is a great site on this : UserVoice Office 365 Video

 

You can find it some of the most interesting new features people expect :

1. embedding video to other pages
2. allowing custom metadata fields
3. viewer analytics and reporting
4. allow screenshots from the video to be set as the thumbnail image.
5. support live streaming

5. Why Adobe Flash is needed ? Will it be always like that ?

Here is an answer (in this thread) Marc Mroz (Microsoft) in reply to Darrell Webster (MVP) | Akl, NZ

We wanted to have Adaptive Streaming and Secure Delivery of the videos over HTTP so we can cache the content in CDNs in the future.
The easiest path to that was with Flash on code that was already available from Azure Media Services.
We are working with Azure Media Services on new player and detection tech that can get the right player (native, html5, or flash) and the right stream from Azure media services, so that we can have adaptive streaming and secure delivery on latest mobile devices and browsers.
This is our number one priority to address as soon as possible and get off our dependency on flash.

6. Can we publish video to external users ?

Here is an answer from Mark Kashman (Microsoft) (in this thread)

Not at this time. Office 365 Video is currently scoped to intranet. Hence we don’t yet support extranet or internet.

We do have technology we can tap into once we feel the system is ready to support these scenarios. For extranet we have external sharing in SharePoint Online that we will consider, and the Azure team is considering the ability to have public/private switch capability – again something we can consider.

7. How much does it cost ?

The quick answer is nothing more than your Office 365 abonnement. But you should take into account the storage space taken on your SPO quota.

Marc Mroz (Microsoft) in reply to Richard Parry (in this thread)

Storage out of SharePoint Online not OneDrive For Business…. We are offering O365 Video for free as part of an Enterprise suite license without any additional costs. To transcode, store, and stream the videos is not super cheap on the compute power alone. To help re-coup some costs and put some sort of cap on it we made a decision to use SPO storage quota to count against the original file. The OneDrive for Business storage is really storage per people’s individual files, hard to justify how we’d store videos for an entire organization in people’s individual personal OneDrives.
I’m sure as people start using O365 Video and we see the usage patterns we may end up making other decisions, but this is what we went with to start with.

8. What is the max file size upload ?

Mark Kashman (Microsoft) (in this thread)

The current upload limit is 2GB, and this applies to SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Office 365 Video. We are aligning with the broader motion that is in development to go beyond 2GB, of which you may have seen the OneDrive (consumer) announcement: https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive-now-supports-10-gb-files/

9.  Will it be possible to integrate with external sources like YouTube, Vimeo… ?

Marc Mroz (Microsoft) (in this thread)

We are looking at doing that. Its not top on our list but its on our list. We’d eventually like to be able to grab an embed from youtube or vimeo, etc and have that show up like any other video in the channel.
How important would this be to you? What kinds of videos would you show in this way?
You can put this on the uservoice forumhttp://aka.ms/o365videofeedback and vote on it.

10. Can I integrate this to on-prem intranet (sp13)? will there be an app/webpart ?

Marc Mroz (Microsoft) (in this thread)

We are considering hybrid option with on-prem in the future but don’t have any committed plans. If we did it, the idea would be that you can link up your on-prem sharepoint with a video portal in the cloud.

11. What are the REST / OfficeGraph API endpoints to pull the videos for a specific channel? Is this documented anywhere yet?

Marc Mroz (Microsoft) (in this thread)

The REST APIs for O365 video is public already but not documented yet. We have that on our list to do. The API has the ability to do just about everything on the video portal, get channels, get videos, upload videos, get/set settings, etc.

12. What are the benefits of using Office 365 Video over a regular media library in SharePoint?

 

From Mikael Svenson (MVP) post here :

• You get a rich out-of-the box video portal. Instead of a static listing, you have editorial functions to control what videos are spotlighted.
• The video portal will handle just about any video format uploaded and transcode automatically. With a SharePoint media library video you can upload multiple video renditions, but you have to do the transcoding manually yourself. This puts too much burden on normal users to manage content.
• Video playback is adaptive to network conditions giving a robust playback experience.
• Video playback is just one click away instead of two. Videos shown in Delve cards or on a search page will be played back from the video portal, and not directly from the library

13. Should I be cautious with storage ?

Definitly yes ! Ben reported some bad behaviour in this post :  Office 365 Video Portal Major Bug In My Opinion – Exploding Site Collection Storage

In my previous post on this : [ #Office365 ] Video user experience and technical stuff i explained that we should probably put storage quota on channel just after their creation.

 

14. Bonus question : What was the original code name for Office 365 Video?

Mark Kashman gave the answer (and the story behind it )  in this thread !

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Answers coming from :

• Official announcement : Introducing Office 365 Video
• Official documentation : Find help about Office 365 Video
• “Official” YamJam on Yammer Office 365 Video group