Controlling Stream Video Versions Designed to Consume Less Disk Storage

Microsoft 365 message center notification MC797116 (30 May 2024, Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 395380) addresses the question of storage consumption in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business for videos managed by Stream. The issue is simple. Any time a video owner updates the non-video content, Stream creates a brand-new version of the video that consumes the same amount of storage as the original.

Many reasons exist to change something for a video, like editing the metadata (title, description (Figure 1), or chapters), editing the transcript to correct flaws in the automatic text generated by the transcription bot, adding callouts through the interactivity feature, and so on.

Many Stream Video Versions

Behind the scenes, SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business treat changes to non-video content in the same way as they handle changes made to Word documents or Excel spreadsheets and create new versions. The impact on storage is obvious if you look at the version history for a video. Figure 2 shows the version history for a 402 MB video that consumes 5,226 MB for the 13 versions stored by OneDrive.

Usually, this method of storing versions doesn’t affect OneDrive for Business accounts. Given that most videos are likely Teams meeting records, few videos are updated, and the version count remains small. In addition. The large storage quotas assigned to OneDrive for Business accounts accommodate a few extra versions without a problem.

The issue is more obvious in SharePoint Online where the tenant-wide storage quota comes under pressure from user demand for document storage, retention processing, and versioning. Buying additional SharePoint Online storage is expensive, and few tenants want to go down that route.

Microsoft announced intelligent versioning for SharePoint Online in July 2023, but according to Microsoft 365 roadmap item 145802, the rollout won’t happen until August 2024. Good things take time to get right.

The Change in the Creation of Stream Video Versions

The change Microsoft is introducing to Stream starting mid-July 2024 with the intention to complete worldwide deployment by late August 2024 is to stop generating new versions of videos for changes that do not affect video content. This is a reasonable approach, and it will prevent the kind of video version sprawl seen in the past (as obvious in Figure 2).

The downside is that metadata changes made to Stream videos are irrecoverable. If you restore a version of a video, you get the metadata available at that time. Any subsequent changes made to video metadata are ignored.

These actions no longer create a new version:

• Editing the title or description from within the Stream browser client.
• Adding or editing chapters, transcripts, captions, or interactivity (callouts or forms).
• Toggling media settings (show/hide about video, chapters, interactivity, comments, analytics, etc.).
• Adding audio tracks.

Any change that affects the video content, like trimming some seconds from the start or end of a video, will force Stream to generate a new version of the video. Once the change reaches your tenant, it goes into effect and cannot be reverted to the previous behavior. The change has no effect on existing videos and will not remove any versions that are already being stored. Microsoft says that if you want to remove extraneous versions, you’ll need to wait for SharePoint Intelligent versioning to appear in your tenant and use that to clean up unwanted video versions stored in SharePoint sites.

Storage is Not a Pressing Problem for OneDrive

At this point, I am unsure if the same approach can be taken to clean up video versions in OneDrive for Business accounts. However, given that storage is much less of an issue in OneDrive than it is in SharePoint Online, and that Teams meeting recordings age out over time, this is probably not a big problem. If you’re worried about OneDrive, run the OneDrive for Business account storage and quota report and see if any account needs attention. I bet hardly any will.

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