Azure Media Services Live Media Streaming General Availability

Yesterday Scott Guthrie announced a number of enhancements to Microsoft Azure. One of the enhancements is the General Availability of Azure Media Services Live Media Streaming. This gives us the ability to stream live events on a service that has already been used to deliver big events such as the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

I’ve look at this for a couple of our projects and found it relatively fast and easy to set up a live media event even from my laptop using its built in camera. There’s a good blob post that walks you through the process of setting up the Live Streaming service. I used this post and was quickly streaming both audio and video from my laptop.

The main piece of software that you need to install is a Video/Audio Encode the supports Smooth Streaming or RTMP. I used the WireCast encoder as specified in the post. You can try out the encoder for 2 weeks as long as you don’t mind seeing the Wirecast Logo on your video (which is removed if you buy a license). Media services pricing can be found here

The Media Services team have provided a MPEG-DASH player to help you test your live streams.

It appears that once you have created a stream that is is still accessible on demand after the event has completed.Also there is around a 20s delay when you receive the stream on your player.