Today, Azure Media Services is launching the public preview of our Live Streaming and Content Protection offerings. The same Internet scale streaming solution that a dozen leading international broadcasters used to seamlessly deliver the 2014 Winter Games and 2014 FIFA World Cup to tens of millions of customers globally is now available in public preview to all Azure customers. You can now stream live events of any size with the same level of scalability, uptime, and reliability that was available to the Olympics and World Cup. And to protect customers’ premium video content, Azure Media is introducing a new Content Protection offering which features both static and dynamic encryption with first party PlayReady license delivery and an AES 128-bit key delivery service.
Faster Speeds and Effective Billing
Azure Media Services is also introducing faster encoding speeds and more cost-effective billing. Our enhanced Azure Media Encoder is designed for premium media encoding and is billed based on output GBs. Our previous encoder was billed on both input + output GBs, so the shift to output only billing will effectively result in a substantial price reduction for all of our customers. We’re also introducing faster encoding speeds via our Basic, Standard, and Premium Encoding Reserved Units. These tiered Reserved Units offer further flexibility by allowing you to tailor the encoding capability you pay for to the needs of your specific workflows.
Azure Media Indexer
Additionally, we are announcing the General Availability of Azure Media Indexer, a powerful, market differentiated content extraction service which can be used to enhance the searchability of audio and video files. Indexer helps you quickly index your media library to search later for keywords, phrases, or clips and also create transcripts of audio files or the audio track of a video file.
New Partners and Client Players
We are also pleased to announce the addition of several workflow partners and client players to our robust partner network. Azure Media Services and Telestream’s Wirecast are now fully integrated, including a built-in destination that makes it quick and easy to send content from Wirecast’s live streaming production software to Azure. Similarly, Newtek’s Tricaster has also been integrated into the Azure platform, enabling customers to combine the high production value of Tricaster with the scalability and reliability of Azure Media Services. Cires 21 and Azure Media have paired up to help make monitoring the health of your live channels simple and easy, and the widely-used JW player is now fully integrated with Azure to enable you to quickly build video playback experiences across virtually all platforms.
We’re very excited to share these announcements with you via our five keynote sessions at IBC. If you’re planning to be in Amsterdam, come check us out! We’ll also be publishing more detailed blog posts on each of these topics throughout the coming week. For more information, stay tuned to this blog, or visit the Azure Media Services webpage and the Media Services Pricing webpage. You can also check out and try these new services in the Azure Management Portal.