Building an On-Demand Video Service with Microsoft Azure Media Services

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Microsoft Azure Media Services allows you to build scalable, cost effective, end-to-end media distribution solutions that can upload, encode, package, and stream media to Windows, iOS, Android, Adobe Flash, and other devices and platforms.

The guide describes a scenario concerning a fictitious company named Contoso that has decided to use Azure Media Services to provide a video-on-demand service as an end-to-end solution.

In addition to describing the client applications, their integration with Azure Media Services, and the decisions made during the design and implementation, this guide discusses related factors, such as the design patterns used, and the ways that the application could be extended or modified for other scenarios.

The result is that, after reading this guide you will be familiar with how to design and implement applications that consume Azure Media services.

This guidance is intended for architects, developers, and information technology professionals who design, build, or maintain video-on-demand or online video portal applications and services, particularly those that integrate with a content management systems. To understand the sample code provided with this guidance, you should be familiar with the Microsoft .NET Framework, the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, the Azure SDK for .NET, ASP.NET MVC, and the Microsoft Visual C# development language.

Building the workflow for the creation, management, and distribution of media is problematic. It involves having to integrate multiple technologies and providers, some of which may be incompatible. In addition, it can require a huge investment in infrastructure, which may not always be fully utilized. These issues can result in a non-standardized workflow that is not easily scaled, and that requires coordination at different stages of the workflow.

Media Services provides everything you'll need to build and operate video-on-demand services to multiple devices and platforms, including all the tools and services you'll need to handle media processing, delivery, and consumption. In addition, Media Services will integrate with content management systems to help your platform scale by using the global footprint of Azure datacenters, without having to plan for capacity spikes or worry about idle datacenters. Together, this helps to reduce the costs that are associated with integrating multiple products and providers when building a media solution.

The following figure shows the road map for the guide.

Note:
This guide also includes appendices that describe how the web service works, and task presets you can use to configure the Azure Media Encoder.

These are the system requirements for building and running the sample solution:

• Microsoft Windows 8.1.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate, Premium, or Professional edition.
• Azure SDK for .NET.
• Windows Phone SDK 8.0.
• Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).
• A Media Services account in a new or existing Azure subscription.

You can download the sample code from http://aka.ms/amsg-code.

This guidance uses a sample application that illustrates consuming Media Services. A panel of experts comments on the development efforts. The panel includes a mobile app specialist, a software developer, a database specialist, and a cloud specialist. The delivery of the sample application can be considered from each of these points of view. The following table lists these experts.