Azure Media Services – Live and on-demand streaming
Microsoft Azure Media Services (AMS) provides the ability to ingest, encode, preview, store, and deliver live streaming media content.
When delivering the content to users, the goal is to deliver high quality media to various devices under different network conditions. To achieve this, azure live encoders are used to encode the source streams to a multi-bitrate (adaptive bitrate) video stream. For streaming on different devices, Media Services dynamic packaging re-packages the source stream to different device supported protocols. Media Services supports delivery of the following adaptive bitrate streaming technologies: HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Smooth Streaming, MPEG DASH.
Azure Media Services makes it easy to use high-definition video encoding and streaming services to reach diverse audience on the most popular devices. Azure Media Services also enables extraction of rich metadata though video AI, improves accessibility, distribution and scalability — all the while protecting the media content.
Azure media service provide live streaming service that enables you to do the following:
- ingest live content using various live streaming protocols (for example RTMP or Smooth Streaming),
- (optionally) encode source stream into adaptive bitrate streams
- preview the live streams
- record and store the ingested content to be streamed later (Video-on-Demand)
- deliver the content through common streaming protocols (for example, MPEG DASH, Smooth, HLS) directly to users, or to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for further distribution.
