Vendors are getting serious about addressing organizations’ internal video content. Last month, Workday Inc. acquired a video course startup called Zaption Inc. to bolster its corporate training business, and now Microsoft Corp. is joining the fray too with a new YouTube-like service called Stream.

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reports that the offering is meant to succeed the built-in media sharing tool in Office 365, but will be released on a standalone basis at first to test the waters. The most distinguishing feature of Stream is a sleek homepage where workers can centrally access videos from their organizations. Much like in the consumer world, the content lineup is filtered based on freshness and the specific interests of each user. The effect is completed by social features for sharing and rating clips that presumably influence the personalization algorithms under the hood as well.

By enabling organizations to make internal videos accessible in a friendlier format, Stream should theoretically help them attract more interest from employees. The service’s centralized frontpage has the added benefit of making it easier to distribute content, since clips are automatically made available to every user. And the sharing process itself is fairly straightforward too: A creator only needs to specify who can view their video and provide some text to go along it with before hitting the upload button.

Compared to consumer-focused services like YouTube, Stream’s feature set is admittedly fairly basic, but Microsoft has big plans for the future. The company is looking to add a live streaming tool for broadcasting important announcements and a number of automation features based on its Azure Machine Learning service. Automatic transcription, video translation and facial recognition are reportedly among the features on Redmond’s roadmap.

Image via Microsoft