Azure Media Services allows you to leverage the highly scalable Azure infrastructure to deliver media content on demand. It boasts the ability to deliver content at a scale equivalent of that used to distribute the Olympics to viewers worldwide! It addition, it supports the ability to live stream muli-bitrate broadcasts, encode content on the fly, and configure accessibility to your content. Azure Media Services is currently in Preview in the Microsoft Azure Portal, so let’s take it for a test spin with a very simply demo of uploading file content and making a highly-scalable publicly distributed link to that content!
1. Create Media Service instance by selecting from panel on the left
2. Name the Media Service, determine the region where you would like it to exist, create a new storage account for your service
3. Wait for Azure to complete the creation of your new Media Service
4. Click on the service to view the “Getting Started” page
5. Click the upload button at the bottom of the screen and select the file you wish to upload
6. Click the “Content” tab and noticed your uploaded content, take note that it’s “Publish Url” value is “Not Published”
7. Click the “Publish” button and the “Publish Url” value will change to a URL
8. Copy and paste the resulting Url and watch your content stream from Azure to your device!
Although this demo may seem very basic, it highlights some interesting ideas. You could theoretically utilize Azure Media Services to create your own Video On Demand service capable of serving a global audience. This could possibly be consumed by client applications for any platform capable of consuming content supported by the Azure Media Service Encoder and even monetized via access controls. In the next article we will look at how to create a near infinitely scalable live broadcast using Azure Media Service Channels. Stay tuned for more on this topic in the next coming weeks!
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