Azure Media Services

Microsoft has added more offerings to the already large catalog of Azure services.  Recently, they announced the launch of Azure Media Services which allows you to upload, encode and deliver streaming media content to a vast array of consuming devices.  Historically, we have had to partner with other vendors to provide the streaming media while leveraging Azure services to deliver our applications.  With this offering, it seems that you could simply partner with Microsoft and allow Azure to fulfill all of the needs you may have to deliver your assets to virtually any device.  While this offering is fairly new, I have gathered the following information.

Answering the Common Questions

1. Protection.  One of the first items people always bring up when building a streaming solution is the protection of assets.  Azure allows you to store and deliver content in a secure fashion by leveraging either Microsoft PlayReady DRM or Apple AES.  

2. User experience.  We are all concerned about ensuring that our content is seen in the best light possible at all times.  Azure Media Services offers the ability to not only encode your media into a large range of standard codecs and adaptive bitrate formats, but to also create an adaptive delivery experience by allowing on-the-fly format conversion.  Your content can be streamed to Windows 8 applications, Windows Phone applications, Browsers (via Silverlight), iOS devices and android devices which covers a large majority of consumer need.

3. Development.  Generally, your streaming partner provides some flavor of SDK for interacting with their service as part of your application development and deployment.  One of the huge by-products by partnering with Azure for this type of application is that their services are native and integrated into the rest of your Azure platform. You can program Media Services using the OData-based REST APIs. You can build an application making REST API calls to Media Services from .NET languages or other programming languages. You can easily deliver your content to devices such as connected TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-Ray players, OTT TV boxes, and mobile devices that have a custom application development framework and a custom media pipeline.  Microsoft provides porting kits (for a fee) that allow you to code to the smooth streaming platform.

4. Ads.  Yes, you can integrate ads into your product using overlays.  This allows you to have both paid and free versions of your application if so desired.

At a glance, this seems pretty powerful.  I am going to dive in and investigate at a more detailed level to see what kind of possibilities this may offer moving forward.