Azure Media Service 🤖 🌀

What is Azure Media Service?

Azure Media Services is a cloud-based platform that enables you to build solutions that achieve broadcast-quality video streaming, enhance accessibility and distribution, analyze content, and much more. Whether you're an app developer, a call center, a government agency, or an entertainment company, Media Services helps you create apps that deliver media experiences of outstanding quality to large audiences on today's most popular mobile devices and browsers.

Azure Media Services lets you deliver any media, on virtually any device, to anywhere in the world using the cloud. The collection of services provide encoding, live or on-demand streaming, content protection and indexing for video and audio content.

What are the four types of services included in Microsoft Azure Media services?

The Windows Azure Media Services platform has four types of services: content uploading, encoding, encrypting content and streaming.

How do I upload a video to Azure Media Services?

Upload files

In the Azure portal, select your Azure Media Services account.

Select Settings > Assets. Then, select the Upload button. The Upload a video asset window appears.

On your computer, go to the video that you want to upload. Select the video, and then select OK. The upload begins.

What can I do with Media Services?

Media Services lets you build a variety of media workflows in the cloud. Some examples of what you can do with Media Services include:

Deliver videos in various formats so they can be played on a wide variety of browsers and devices. For both on-demand and live streaming delivery to various clients (mobile devices, TV, PC, and so on), the video and audio content needs to be encoded and packaged appropriately. To see how to deliver and stream such content, see Quickstart: Encode and stream files.

Stream live sporting events to a large online audience, like soccer, baseball, college and high school sports, and more.

Broadcast public meetings and events, like town halls, city council meetings, and legislative bodies.

Analyze recorded videos or audio content. For example, to achieve higher customer satisfaction, organizations can extract speech-to-text and build search indexes and dashboards. Then, they can extract intelligence around common complaints, sources of complaints, and other relevant data.

Create a subscription video service and stream DRM protected content when a customer (for example, a movie studio) needs to restrict the access and use of proprietary copyrighted work.

Deliver offline content for playback on airplanes, trains, and automobiles. A customer might need to download content onto their phone or tablet for playback when they anticipate to be disconnected from the network.

Implement an educational e-learning video platform with Azure Media Services and Azure Cognitive Services APIs for speech-to-text captioning, translating to multi-languages, and so on.

Use Azure Media Services together with Azure Cognitive Services APIs to add subtitles and captions to videos to cater to a broader audience (for example, people with hearing disabilities or people who want to read along in a different language).

Enable Azure CDN to achieve large scaling to better handle instantaneous high loads (for example, the start of a product launch event).