Microsoft today announced a few updates from its Azure public cloud’s Media Services division. Most importantly, the Live Encoding service for encoding live streaming video feeds will become generally available to customers in the next few weeks, following a preview over the past few months.
“Live Encoding allows you to send a single bitrate live feed to Azure Media Services, have it encoded into an adaptive bitrate stream and deliver it to a wide variety of clients for delivery in MPEG-DASH, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HLS, or Adobe HDS formats,” Microsoft Azure Media Services director Sudheer Sirivara wrote in a blog post.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1801263,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"cloud,dev,media,","session":"B"}']Microsoft will also allow customers of the Media Encoder Standard service to create live archives of feeds in .MP4 format. And Azure Media Services is getting support for Google Widevine digital rights management, after Microsoft PlayReady DRM support was introduced last year. That means people with Macs and Android devices can watch content in Microsoft’s Azure Media Player, which now features playback for audio in multiple languages.
Video encoding is becoming more and more important for cloud providers as just another workload they can handle in house for customers.
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Earlier this month Amazon Web Services, the largest public cloud provider, announced that it had acquired Elemental Technologies, which provides video encoding services for many media companies. AWS reportedly made the deal for half a billion dollars. That sort of deal could inspire other cloud providers to either buy remaining encoding companies or start building their own comparable services.
Of course, Microsoft also cuts prices for compute and storage to remain competitive in the cloud business.
For its encoding services, Microsoft Azure charges by the gigabyte for output. Prices are available here.
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