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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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