Clipchamp is coming to Microsoft’s commercial customers
Microsoft is making Clipchamp available to their Microsoft 365 commercial customers after limiting access to consumer users for too long. As usual, Microsoft’s announcement has many ‘fine print’ details to annoy paying customers.
Clipchamp is Microsoft’s online video editing service. It’s been available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family customers since 2021 but for some unexplained reason not their commercial clients.
That’s a somewhat pointless limitation because almost all ClipChamp features are available to anyone with a free Microsoft account. All anyone in a company has to do is switch accounts in a browser window and they can use Clipchamp to their hearts content.
Stick with Clipchamp personal – for now
You’re better off using Clipchamp with a personal Microsoft account, for the moment. As you’ll see, the initial release of Clipchamp for commercial customers is missing important features.
More about Clipchamp
Clipchamp video, getting started with the latest from Microsoft
What are ClipChamp videos and how to try it today
How to add textbox to video on Clipchamp
Microsoft 365 customers get more from Clipchamp
Clipchamp for some commercial customers
Clipchamp will be available for accounts with Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Premium and Business Standard.
That excludes the Business Basic plan which doesn’t include Microsoft 365 desktop apps.
When will Clipchamp commercial arrive?
A ‘targeted release’ starts at the end of August 2023. It’s up to your organizations IT gods to decide who gets earlier access.
Not the same Clipchamp
If you’ve already used Clipchamp, then you’ll see some missing features when you login with a commercial account.
The missing features aren’t minor ones, according to Microsoft the omissions ‘include’ “brand kit, stock video, audio and images, text to speech, automatic captions or subtitles, advanced titles and annotations.”
In other words, a lot of the useful video edit features that commercial customers would expect.
Microsoft implies, with no timeline, that commercial user Clipchamp will later get these missing pieces.
The mystery of accessing Clipchamp commercial
According to Microsoft, Clipchamp commercial will be available from various points. BUT not all of them at first and Microsoft won’t even say which will appear first <unnecessary mystery>.
All anyone can say is to look for Clipchamp in one of these places:
- Microsoft 365 App Launcher,
- Clipchamp start page in Microsoft 365 for the web,
- Microsoft 365 Create New Page,
- On the web within OneDrive and SharePoint by clicking New.
In other words, Clipchamp will eventually appear in all the places you’d expect, alongside all the other apps and services.
What about the Windows app?
Clipchamp is firstly an online video editing tool but there’s also a Windows app.
Commercial customers will only be able to use the browser based Clipchamp in Edge or Chrome.
For the moment, Clipchamp Windows app only works for personal accounts. Microsoft promises it’ll be expanded to allow commercial customers at some unspecified future time.
No Shared video editing
Clipchamp doesn’t support collaboration on video editing so it’s no surprise that the commercial version won’t either.
However, since video projects are stored on OneDrive or Sharepoint, more than one person can edit individually.
What about Microsoft Stream?
Stream is Microsoft’s video management service for commercial customers.
Clipchamp videos with work accounts are automatically added to Stream. There’ll be options to make a sharing link or move onto Stream.
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