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When Stream Refuses to Store a Teams Meeting Recording
Stream is the video service for Microsoft 365. A lot of the activity in Stream is driven by processing and viewing of Teams meeting recordings. Microsoft’s advice about how to record a Teams meeting gives all the details of how to record a meeting and save the recording in Stream. What it doesn’t tell you is how to deal with the situation where a recording can’t be stored in Stream (Figure 1).
No Stream License, No Recordings Saved
The most common reason why this happens is when the person who records the meeting isn’t licensed to use Stream. Microsoft bundled a Stream license into all Office 365 enterprise plans, so it’s unusual to have a situation like that shown in Figure 2 where an account is assigned an Office 365 E5 license, but Stream is disabled. Nevertheless, based on the number of questions about why recordings fail, it’s obvious that some tenants remove Stream licenses from accounts (maybe using PowerShell as explained in this article).
It’s possible that tenants disabled Stream in the past because they didn’t think that Stream was needed. However, if you want to capture recordings for Teams meetings, you need a Stream license. Accounts also need Stream licenses to view videos stored in Stream. including when links to Teams meeting recordings are posted in chats or channels.
Restricted Uploads for Stream
Another reason why people can’t upload to Stream is that the tenant has restricted the set of people allowed to create new videos in Stream (Figure 3). This control might have been set at a time when Stream acted as the repository for company-produced videos and only official videos ended up in the portal. It’s inappropriate when you want users to store Teams recordings in Stream.
Stream’s Connection to Teams
The process of recording a Teams meeting goes like this:
- Stream regards whoever records the meeting as the owner. The owner is the account that can set permissions on a video once it is processed and stored in Stream.
- When recording starts, a bot joins the meeting to capture the media stream.
- When recording finishes, the media stream is saved in Stream for further processing, like adding the automatic transcript and generating recordings in different formats.
- Stream then tries to save the recording in the owner’s account. This fails because the account is not licensed.
- Instead of posting a link to the processed recording in the conversation, Teams posts a link to the raw video. This is what has happened in Figure 1.
Rescuing Unsaved Meeting Recordings
The solution to the problem is to make sure that anyone who records Teams meetings is assigned a Stream license. To fix the problem with an unprocessed recording, for up to 21 days after the meeting ends, any team member can download the video (an MP4 file) from Teams and save it to their workstation (Figure 4). Teams automatically removes the video after 21 days.
Next, the user can upload the recording to Stream (they’ll need a license to do this), add the necessary properties (Figure 5), and Stream will process the recording as normal.
The person who uploads the recording to Stream is now its owner. They can share the recording with the people who need access. They can also get a link to the video from Stream and post the link to Teams to allow team members to access the recording (Figure 6).
As reported in this article, some Office 365 datacenter regions do not support the Stream service, which prevents users from being able to record meetings. Microsoft plans to allow tenants to opt for storage in the closest region which supports Stream. That plan should have come into effect by now but has been delayed.
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What happens is an owner of a video leaves the company and their account is deleted?
The Stream admin can rescue the videos and assign ownership to other people.
I have same request, owner left company but mailbox has not deleted it’s just removed with licence.
You can use the deleted users function in Stream admin to transfer ownership to another user.
Even with a valid stream Licence, Teams meeting recording is currently not available for non US tenant.
That’s factually incorrect. My tenant is in Ireland and part of the Western European datacenter region and I can happily record Teams meetings and store the recordings in Stream. What might be happening is that the Stream services don’t currently run in your datacenter region. Microsoft planned to allow tenants to use Stream in another datacenter region but events got in the way and the plan is delayed. See https://office365itpros.com/2020/01/21/teams-meeting-recordings-stream/
Maybe you should subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook https://gum.co/O365IT/ to stay up-to-date with developments like this…. 😉
In addition, If you assign Stream license but restrict video upload to some users then it will be the same way of working. Not having uploading authorization prevent you do save meeting recording in Stream.
@Tony, I known that for live event they are stored only 90 days within Stream. If you want to keep them permanently you need to download them and upload them again as a « standard » video. Is there also this limit for standard meeting? Did meeting recording are deleted automatically x days after the meeting?
20 days for a standard meeting… I say this in the article. But hey, who reads everything these days…
Tony, 20 days you mentionned within the article is the time to download the video when failed to upload to Stream. I was speaking about the retention of the video if it is successfully uploaded to Stream. Is it the same retention?
Sorry. Once a video is uploaded to Stream, it stays there until it is removed. Stream doesn’t currently support retention policies. Microsoft said that this feature is coming (at Ignite 2019) but I haven’t seen any sign since.
Hi Tony,
As always, thank you for such informative posts 🙂
Wondering if you can help us clarify something, as it seems that information on Microsoft’s side is contradictive.
Prerequisites for Teams cloud meeting recording (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cloud-recording#prerequisites-for-teams-cloud-meeting-recording) state the following:
User needs to be licensed to upload/download meetings to/from Microsoft Stream, however they do not need the license to record a meeting. If you wish to block a user from recording a Microsoft Teams Meeting, you must grant a TeamsMeetingPolicy that has AllowCloudRecording set to $False.
Our experience is the same as you wrote above (no Stream license results in failure to upload a meeting recording), but according to Microsoft documentation an unlicensed user should still be able to record a meeting?
I think the mismatch is in what Teams allows someone to do (record a meeting) and what Stream does (store the recording). With a Teams license and the right policy in place, you can record a meeting, but Stream won’t allow you to process and store that recording unless your account has a Stream license.
Hi Tony,
Not sure if something has changed in the past few months but it seems that restricting video upload no longer affects Teams meeting recordings. We have configured the setting to only allow a specific group to be able to upload videos so that other licensed users are no longer able to upload videos. However, Teams meeting recordings are successfully uploaded to Stream for all licensed users.
I would say this is a welcomed change and it now behaves as it should – Stream can be utilized as a repository for Teams meeting recordings without enabling users to store other content to Stream until the right governance policies are in place.
Hi Tony,
If the video failed to upload to Stream, are other meeting attendees able to view the recording? Or is the video owner the only person with the ability to view the recording?
Nope. The other attendees can’t view the video.
is this still true
I just checked and team members can download the video (that isn’t uploaded to Stream) from the meeting chat until it is removed from Teams after 21 days.
so if the user doesnt have license to Stream, and the meeting recording obviously got an error failed to upload to stream.
i understood the organizer only can still access the recording within 20 days. i have 2 questions here:
1) how can the organizer access the meeting recording without Stream? what options he has?
there is no download link option available , it’s only an error (Failed to upload to stream)
2) attendees cannot access the same , right? only the organizer?
Thank you
The organizer downloads the video in Teams. They don’t go near Stream because the video hasn’t been processed for access through Stream.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/cloud-recording has been updated recently with:
Users won’t need a Microsoft Stream license assigned if you want users to only record and download the recordings. This will mean that the recordings aren’t stored in Microsoft Stream but are instead stored in Azure Media Services (AMS) with a 30 day limit before it’s deleted. It’s not something at this point that an admin can control or manage including the ability to delete it.
Actually, now that I read the text in the documentation more carefully, it says what I report in this post. Users don’t need Stream licenses to record meetings or download recordings. They need the license to have the recording uploaded and processed by Stream.
We are still having trouble with this. We have an open incident with MS. We’d like to let users record, but we do not wish to leverage Stream. We expect that the user would be able to download the MP4 from Teams within 20 days as stated. However when we test, we’ve had hit or miss success. We usually have the condition that @nora stated: :…here is no download link option available , it’s only an error (Failed to upload to stream)”. Has anyone successfully implemented recording in Teams without the dependency of Stream?
Once meeting or vidioe call got over, does the owner should save the recorded video in to Streams or it will get automatically saved in to Streams?.
And if a owner is left who recorded a video how to restore it and provide to attendee please.
The owner can post a link to the video in Stream and attendees can see the video that way. Guests can’t because Stream doesn’t support guest access.
Hi Tony,
a user of our tenant has a problem. The Upload of the record failed (the user has a stream license E3 und “create content in Stream” permission). So I dont understand why it failes. Last time it was working fine. The User wants to delete the record from the Azure Media Service (Teams Chat download link) because not every attendee of the meeting is allowed to download the file. Any idea how to solve this problem?
Thx
Andi
I don’t have a suitable test case here to try, but a delete option might be available if you click on the recording. If not, you might have to wait for the recording to expire, which I think is 20 days. Or file a support call with Microsoft and see if they can do some magic…
I did not have the access to ms stream. I want to delete recording now, how can I do it?
Is the recording still shown in Teams?
Hi Tony, User was not assigned with streams license and now wanted to delete the recording file and restrict others to not to download the file due to some confidentiality. Is there any way that we can delete the recording file or have to wait for 20 days? also can we change the service days from 20 to desired date?
I don’t believe that you can change the 20-day period. It’s there to make sure that people can recover a recording should the need arise, even if they forget to do so immediately after an event. If the meeting is in a channel, the admin of the team should be able to remove it.
Hello Tony, once the recorded video is available to download in chat area, all Meeting attendees can download it. So, all set up we made to make sure only the presenter is able to share a recorded video now is ineffective, since all users can download it within a 20-day period. How can I disable this download option once I (presenter) downloaded and made it available at Stream?
I don’t believe you can disable the option. Sounds like a good ask on Teams User Voice.
Hey Tony- If the video did not upload to Stream then how do i delete it? It is able to download for 20 days. Can i just delete it?
It looks like you (or team owners and Teams admins) can’t remove the video from the chat. According to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/stream/portal-upload-teams-meeting-recording, the recording will remain there for 21 days and then be removed. There’s been some changes in this area recently, and that’s what the current state of play seems to be.
what can i do when if whenever i am downloading the recorded meetings, it suddenly went missing. I dunno why his happens. Whenever it’s about to be done.. let’s say a few minutes to complete, suddenly the file gone missing. What i do right now as a band aid solution is that, i wait for it to at least be at 95 percent done, then quit MS Teams, then an mp4 file will be completed. However, since i stopped it from finishing the rendering, the recorded meeting is always not complete. 🙁 I’ve been having this problem since July 2020. (I’m updated with the latest version of MS Teams and currently using it as a classroom for online class. I’m a college lecturer.
I’d file a support call with Microsoft. There’s something screwy going on and you need someone to investigate.
It would be nice and logical for the meeting admin to have the ability to simply delete the recording. Why this doesn’t exist is beyond me.
good day
we have recorded a meeting, teams says recording is ready but the recording does not play, it is not dowloadable. furthermore there is an error icon (you know… a triangle with an exclamation mark inside) on the recording
Contact Microsoft support. They are the only ones who can help you.