Azure Blob Storage Streaming .mp4 Video

Question

Hi,

I'm planning to use Azure Blob Storage to host the .mp4 videos and to be played in mobile app with the daily active users of 200-500 per day. I'm just wondering if Azure Blob Storage can handle this request and how scalable it is. Or should we use Azure Media Services instead?

Answer 1

@Vince Welcome to Microsoft Q&A, Thank you for posting your query!

I would recommended to use Azure Media Service based on your scenario, For quick starts for encoding and streaming and see if you get better performance for your scenario. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/media-services/latest/

• Blob Storage: Stores large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data, that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS. You can use Blob storage to expose data publicly to the world, or to store application data privately.
• Azure Media Services Encoder: Encoding jobs are one of the most common processing operations in Media Services. You create encoding jobs to convert media files from one encoding to another.
• Azure Media Services Streaming Endpoint: A streaming service that can deliver content directly to a client player application, or to a content delivery network (CDN) for further distribution.
• Media Services supports integration with Azure CDN (for more information, see How to Manage Streaming Endpoints in a Media Services Account). You can use Live streaming with CDN. Azure Media Services provides Smooth Streaming, HLS and MPEG-DASH outputs. All these formats use HTTP for transferring data and get benefits of HTTP caching. In live streaming actual video/audio data is divided to fragments and this individual fragments get cached in CDN. Only data needs to be refreshed is the manifest data. CDN periodically refreshes manifest data.
• If you have plans to stream to possible multiple users consider to use Azure Media Services and also CDN to save cost with network out:
• The output from Media Services is a blob into a container.

For more information refer to this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/solution-ideas/articles/digital-media-video

Azure Blob Storage: If you are just looking to store JPEG or PNG images, you should keep those in Azure Blob Storage. There is no benefit to putting them in your Media Services account unless you want to keep them associated with your Video or Audio Assets. Or if you might have a need to use the images as overlays in the video encoder. Media Encoder Standard supports overlaying images on top of videos, and that is what it lists JPEG and PNG as supported input formats.

Hope this helps!

Kindly let us know if the above helps or you need further assistance on this issue.

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Answer 2

Azure media service is being retired, set for June 2024 and will drop support for it. I would recommend, finding another solution

Answer 3

Thanks for swift response @Sumarigo-MSFT I think this should be fitted for our requirements.

Answer 4

It's a little dated (focused on the v2 version of Media Services instead of v3), but https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/randomnumber/progressive-download-and-streaming-differences-with-azure-media-services should help.

Answer 5

For organizations looking for a code-free pre-packaged solution for streaming videos stored in your Azure Blob Storage, I would recommend going for an easy-to-use YouTube-like enterprise video platform that can connect with Azure Blob Storage. My recommendation would be VIDIZMO, a Microsoft IP Co-Sell Ready Partner Solution, that packages various Azure services like Azure Media Services, Azure Video Indexer, Azure Cognitive Services, etc. to ensure that you remain in the Azure environment without worrying about the backend operations.

VIDIZMO lets stream live and on-demand videos for internal and external audiences. On top of it, it provides end-to-end video content management capabilities like automatic transcoding, AI-powered search, limited sharing, content segregation through user groups, and above all else enterprise-grade security. The platform is compatible with all devices, browsers, and supports adaptive streaming for varying bandwidth conditions. Learn more in this in-depth article: How to Stream Videos from Azure Blob Storage?