A talk I give to a non-dev audience at Azure Meetup 1st October 2014 in Dubai, UAE.

1. Media Streaming
with Azure Media
Services
ZEDDY ISKANDAR
http://zeddylabs.com
@zeddyiskandar

2. Agenda
 First half:
My experience with Live SmoothStreaming & media
encoding.
 What happens behind the scenes.
 Second half:
 How Azure Media Services can help.

3. Obama Visit Live Streaming

5. Background
 Partnership among US Embassy, Microsoft Indonesia, RCTI (local TV),
Armanovus (my company).
 At the time, Silverlight was alive and kicking 
 The goal was to share Obama’s speech at University of Indonesia using
Live Streaming and later Recorded Streaming.

6. Obama Visit Live Streaming Architecture
Could have done better with dedicated hardware encoding, but dedicated PC with Microsoft Expression Media Encoder software
apparently works 

7. TV Live Streaming to Windows Phone

9. Background
 Partnership between Kompas TV (local TV),
Armanovus (my company).
 Ambitious: streaming to major mobile platform
(BlackBerry, Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7)
– yes in that order was the market share for Indonesia at the time

10. Did you know…headache of
supporting multi-smartphones
 I sent this email to Microsoft in April 2012 (may be outdated now)
 Windows Phone only supports H.264 via Progressive Download delivery
(not streaming)
 Android 2.x only supports H.263 via RTSP delivery. Android 3.x and above
supports H.264 via RTSP & HTTP(s)
 BlackBerry OS 4.x & 5.x support H.263 or H.264, but only via RTSP delivery
 Apple has their own Apple HTTP Streaming Format for iOS: basically H.264
video but segmented into 30secs videos stored in an MP3 playlist format

11. Kompas TV Live Streaming Architecture
Again, could have done better with dedicated hardware encoding, and Wowza Media Server was painful to configure

12. Modern Streaming Architecture

13. What was wrong w/
Previous Solutions?

14. Here’s a hint…

15. What was wrong w/
Previous Solutions? (1)
 Software Encoding running on PC/Workstation vs Dedicated Hardware for
Encoding
 Hardware Encoders operating systems are usually not general-purpose (e.g.
does not need to listen for UI input), designed to optimize to run certain tasks
only.
 Hardware Encoders are easier to scale

16. What was wrong w/
Previous Solutions? (2)
 What if you access the streaming outside Indonesia?
S.L.O.W
Needs CDN, but based on usage & scalable-on-demand

17. Azure Media Services

18. Definition

19. Step 1 & 2

20. Step 3

21. Step 4

22. Creating New Azure Media Service Portal

23. Uploading Video to Az Me Se Portal

24. Does not support Apple’s .MOV 

25. Convert to MP4 using your fave tool (Premiere Pro is overkill, but hey I have Adobe Cloud Subscription) 

26. Now Encode!

27. and Publish!

28. What’s different w/ Az Me Se?
Cloud
 Encode faster by reserving more units for Encoding Jobs
 Replicate storage to other data center (US, Europe, SEA) with a click
 Pricing:
 Upload content: FREE
 Encoding
 Streaming

29. What’s different w/ Az Me Se?
Dynamic Packaging (1)
 Traditionally to cater to H.264 Streaming packaged in MPEG-2 Transport
via HTTP(s) [iOS and Android 3++] , you need to store the pre-delivery
packages in certain format.
 To cater to H.264 Streaming packaged in MPEG-4 Fragments via HTTP(s)
[Windows Phone, PC, Tablet, Xbox], you also need to store the pre-delivery
packages in another format.
Video sources Multi-bitrates Mp4
Origin Server
HLS
Smooth
Streaming
Encode
Traditional Encode and Package

30. What’s different w/ Az Me Se?
Dynamic Packaging (2)
 Lo and behold! We do not need to worry about different packages for different
smartphones anymore! Just upload and let Azure Media Services dynamically
package it to different smartphones!
 If new format comes up (MPEG-DASH!), you don’t need to upgrade your
Encoding Software, as long as you pay the Az Me Se subscription 
Video sources Multi-bitrates Mp4
Origin Server
HLS
Smooth
Streaming
Encode
Dynamic
Packaging
Dynamic Packaging
DASH

31. Live Smooth Streaming

32. Create new Live Channel of type Smooth Streaming

33. Capture from Camera using Expression Encoder

34. Choose Smooth Streaming as Output

35. Copy Azure Ingest URL to Publishing Point

36. Copy Azure Publish URL to App

37. Thank you!