Building End to End Video Workflows in the Cloud by Peter Walsted, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Azure Media Services

Imagine building an end to end live video workflow where all components would exist in Azure?

In today’s live video world, you are dependent on heavy investments in on-premises hardware to support your encoding efforts and your constant struggle with operational issues. Can this be simplified by allowing you to plug your existing live stream into an endpoint and you are ready to go? Yes, that is now a reality with Azure Media Services, as we are releasing a public preview of Live Encoding. By leveraging the power and scalability of Azure, you are now able to build end to end video workflows that runs truly in the cloud.

This public preview of Live Encoding for Azure Media Services leverages the same live encoding technologies used to power digital coverage of some of the largest events on the planet, such as Super Bowl XLIX and the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

What does it do?

Live Encoding for Azure Media Services expands on the industry-proven live cloud platform. It can be combined with dynamic packaging, dynamic encryption, sub-clipping, dynamic manifest manipulation, ad-marker insertion, and near-seamless live/on-demand capabilities to build comprehensive live and cloud DVR workflows.

Common use cases include event-based streaming with dynamic ad insertion, plus 24/7 streaming with cloud DVR requirements.

Features include:

• Live encoding of a single bitrate live feed into an adaptive bitrate stream

• Ability to ingest a live feed over RTP protocol (MPEG transport streams), RTMP, and Smooth Streaming

• Ability to control insertion of slates and to signal ad insertions to the client

• Thumbnail previews of the live feed

Source: http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/05/27/building-end-to-end-video-workflows-in-the-cloud/