Have a video on your SharePoint site and want to make a page/news from it? Now you can do it with just a few clicks! Microsoft released a new feature that automatically creates pages for your site with embedded videos. Let’s find out how it works.
Introduction
SharePoint Online has become a video central. You can publish videos, embed them on any page, add a translated transcript, add comments to a video with your colleagues, analyze trends, and so on. I love the way it works now – a few clicks and a video is published and shared with my team.
The latest update from Microsoft gives you a nice and fast way to create pages directly from a video. It’s a nice concept to promote such content as a news post or dedicated pages with additional information.
The SharePoint team prepared 4 templates that you can use to speed up the publishing process:
- Starter – just a blank page with an embedded video
- Training – a video webpart with additional information, great for sharing training stuff
- Recap – ready-to-use template for sharing a meeting recap (with recording 😊)
- Message – one more template with some additional webparts
With those templates, you can quickly start working with a page and modify it to meet your requirements and expectations. There are a few interesting features hidden inside so let’s build a page and discover some hidden gems.
Create a Video News page
Before you start you must have a video in any library on your SharePoint site.
1. Click on a video of your choice – it will open with all the controls and actions panes. Select the Share button.

2. Select the Create video news post from the menu

3. On the welcome screen select Get Started and now you can choose a template (1). By default, the page will be created as a News post but you can change it to a standard page using a News post or page section (2). Is it important? Yes, it is! A News post displays on the news feed and is optimized for emails while a Page is designed for full screen experience.

4. When you choose a template select the Use template button and your page will be created. Now you can work with it as with any standard news or page – add webparts, modify existing, and so on. You can also save or publish the page, check details, and more. There are 2 features worth mentioning – Email preview and Post and send.

5. The Email preview gives you a mobile preview of the page. It is automatically scaled to fit a screen on your mobile. The video is scaled as well.

6. When you click on the Post and send button, you get an additional window with email details. You must enter the recipient(s) address, add CC addresses, and modify an email title if you want.
Important note – you can send emails to any internal people or groups, but you can’t send them to external users.
Select the Send button to make it fly to recipients😊

Emails
The internal mechanism sends messages using your email account! You can’t change the sender address and recipients can reply to you with questions and feedback.

If you edit the News post with your video SharePoint won’t send any updates via email. It is a manual process and you must resend it using the Share options (select the Send as email button). You can also send it to different recipients or even test it on your own mailbox.

Video Page
If you select a Page option during the creation process SharePoint prepares a standard page. The first difference is that it won’t be published in the SharePoint Newsfeed. The second one – there is no way to send it via email (only the Publish button is available) or is it?

When you select the Share button you find the Send as email option 😊 No matter what type you select the page will be e-mail ready!

Summary
Creating a Video News post or a Video Page is a nice addition to existing features. It’s great when you need to share information with colleagues via e-mail. It might feel a little bit old-fashioned (don’t use emails -> use Teams 😉) but it’s an option that you can use for front-line workers or anyone who can’t check SharePoint sites regularly.
What I love is that the whole message is scaled to my mobile device. I can see all content without glitches or scrolling to the right or left. I tested it on different devices without any issues. Worth checking!