At its Ignite 2020 IT Pro conference this week, Microsoft officials announced plans to rebuild its Stream video service, making it the default video platform for all Microsoft 365 apps. Microsoft plans to migrate customers of the current Microsoft Stream service to the new Stream over a course of multiple months.

Microsoft launched its Stream video app in 2017, replacing its Office 365 Video service. Stream is service for creating, uploading, sharing, managing and viewing corporate videos. In the past several months, use of Stream has really taken off, official ssaid, as a result of remote work, remote learning and increasing employee engagement.

But there have been a lot of limitations around the current Microsoft Stream, officials conceded at Ignite. The current Stream service isn’t consistent with the rest of Microsoft 365, in terms of architecture, channels, permissions, governance, sharing and guest access. Stream currently powers videos uploaded to Stream, but not the rest of Microsoft 365, such as SharePoint, Teams and Office. Streams is basically a siloed product/service.

Microsoft’s new plan for Stream is to make it the video platform for all videos in Microsoft 365, whether those videos are created/views in Teams, SharePoint, Yammer or another app. The new Stream will use SharePoint and OneDrive to store and manage all videos., which means it will inherent the Microsoft 365 compliance, governance, permissions, external sharing and endpoint integration. Customers will have the option of creating their own branded video portals in the ne Stream and/or to customize and integrate video with their own Intranets.

As part of its new strategy, Microsoft also is developing a new Stream web app which will be integrated with office.com, officials said.

Before the end of this calendar year, Microsoft will be delivering on some of the pieces of its new Stream roadmap (as indicated in its roadmap. Teams Meeting recordings will be saved to OneDrive and SharePoint starting in Q4. The new Stream web app is tentatively slated for Q2 2021, as is playback quality and scalability matching what’s currently offered. Migration tooling should be in place in preview by Q2, 2021, as well.

Officials said they do not yet have more detailed migration timing or an end of support date for the existing Stream service to share. But they did stress that the migration will happen in phases and won’t happen suddenly.