Microsoft Releases Azure-based Streaming Video

Windows has been preparing for its launch into the cloud video streaming business for some time. It used the Azure Media Services back in 2012, while it was still in beta, to livestream the London Olympics. In January 2013, the company announced the public release of its Azure-based streaming video service, which enables enterprises to stream on-demand video to any device without having to first build their own infrastructure. The service is designed to allow efficient delivery of training videos to employees, video streaming from a website or to create a video-on-demand service akin to Netflix or Hulu. While perhaps not so many businesses will be interested in the latter services, the video training service is already drawing a lot of attention.

"Our internal research shows that more than one-third of today's Internet traffic is devoted to video consumption, and we expect that to grow to 80 percent by the end of 2015," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president for Windows Azure.

Windows Azure Media Services is designed to provide its cloud-based platform-as-a-service offerings, to facilitate video streaming services, by eliminating the necessity of an infrastructure.

"It's a state of affairs that can put a damper on media companies' ambitions. Not everyone has the expertise or capital required to build a media infrastructure, so Windows Azure Media Services enables companies everywhere to build custom media solutions that easily scale and adapt to meet consumers' needs, wherever or however they consume it." Guthrie added.

Windows Azure Media Services allows enterprises to stream video to a wide range of devices, including TVs, tablets, smartphones, laptops, and game consoles running iOS, Android and Windows. It also gives developers the power to construct workflows for automatic uploading, encoding and delivery of video using Java SDKs, .Net or REST APIs, which are all available for direct download from the Azure developer website. Developers who need assistance will also find documentation to get them underway.

According to Guthrie, a live streaming version is currently available for private previewing, and a public preview will soon follow. To gain access to Windows Azure Media Services, users pay a flat rate, starting from $1.99 per gigabyte. The price decreases for higher volumes. The cost of streaming video depends on bandwidth and storage if traffic is low to moderate. For a larger number of users, more origin servers may be added. (CU) Link