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Windows Azure Media services contains a ton of features that we can use to make our applications rich with media and do it very easily. Media Services consolidate enconding, storage, search, and delivery into an offering that is truly streamlined. Download this poster of everything media services encompasses so that you can understand exactly what we're talking about in this article. In this first part we will be discussing Live Streams and the options that come with them. In successive blog articles I will dive into Video On-Demand Solutions and Streaming as well. The full documentation for Windows Azure Media Services is located here : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/media-services/ and is a great starting point for all of this. I will periodically be calling out certain links I used that were helpeful.
We will walk through setting up a new Azure Media Services account and streaming data live from your PC to a web browser. Many factors increase how you want to configure your streaming setup, but performance and cost will be paramount when using Azure Media Services Live Video. Decisions you make directly impact pricing and scalability performance as your application grows a user base. What may have worked for 5-10 users, may not perform well for 500-1000 users. Subsequently, costs may also go up and based on your pricing model it will affect your bottomline. Things to consider :
Let's take a look at the Azure costs associated with Live Video. Before I approach any project I am always browsing to The Windows Azure Pricing Calculator. The calculator is great because it lets you plan for all costs upfront. For example, looking at our second questions above "Do we need to support various bit rates?". This question is important because it decides if we need to encode our stream on-demand. When using the Azure Calculator you can see that choosing the "With Encoding" option for Live Video greatly effects the price per month for 500 hours of video.
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As you can see our cost per month goes up drastically! Deciding on whether your live stream will be encoded in Azure on-demand or by an on-premises program if a very important decision. See options here for using an on-premises encoder. One scenario to also consider if if you're buildign an application that allows users to spin up their own streams on-demand. Something where they can broadcast themselves to others. Will you require a certain program or need to use Azure's live encoder? Encoding 1 hour of video is about a $20.00 charge in Azure. For this demo we will use telestream Wirecast to
Follow this link to add a new Azure Media Services account to your subscription : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/media-services-create-account/
Once you have an active accountm, the dashboard screen for your account is a great way to download samples and view options for your service.
Browse into your new Media service and click on the Channels sub navigation across the top. Then click create channel. Create a new channel with Encoding Type set to "None".
Go onto Step 2, and select "RTMP" for the ingest protocol and in Step 3 just accept the defaults. Select OK to create your channel. These settings are important depending on the technologies you require and certain security settings, but for brevity sake we will move forward with the defaults. Your channel should now be ready for use!
For this demo we're going to use telestream Wirecast . You can download it from the link provided. Once downloaded you will be able to create a new stream to send to be ingested by Azure. When you start up Wirecast after download, click the + sign at the bottom of the program to add a new input source. Choose your audio/video capture device. Once chosen you should see the device's stream being shown in the input box.
Next, you will want to setup your output settings for this device. Choose Output > Output Settings and choose Azure Media Services from the dropdown. Click OK, and then you will need to go back into Output > Output Settings to enter you information. You should now see a new Output setting entry and the ability to enter your Ingest URL address and also configure various Encoding options. For this test we simply support one output encoding of 720p. Browse back to the Azure Portal and click on the Ingest Url link in the portal so it pops up your endpoints :
Copy your Primary RTMP URL and paste it into the address box of your Output Settings and click OK. Next, click on your input device in the bottom row which will promote it to Preview in Wirecast.
Next click the ---> button in the center of the screen to promote your preview stream to LIVE. This should show your stream in the Live Broadcast Area now. Click the Stream button in the top left of the Wirecast UI and this will start pushing your stream to Azure. (NOTE : This can be CPU intensive!!)
Browse back to the Azure Portal and after selecting your channel in the portal click the PLAY button at the bottom of the portal. Choose "Play Preview URL". You should now get a popup showing your stream in a preview player on the portal!
You have now confirmed you stream is being published properly via the preview player. Now you can Publish it LIVE to a streaming endpoint. Azure offers a single command to be able to package this all up. Simply press the Start Streaming button and choose unencrypted for now. The neat thing about this is once you complete streaming, Azure packages this up and makes this "Program" available to you on the Content tab. You can then distribute that link for users to watch at anytime as a Video-On-Demand. We will learn more about this in Part 3 of this Media Services series.
Now that we are publishing the live endpoint. You can see the endpoint in the Streaming Endpoints tab in the portal. You can click into the endpoint and scale and confiure it to use CDN.
Let's now go view our Live Stream in a player. You should now notice a Publish URL is set for your channel. Copy that and you should get something like this :
To test this, Azure has provided an awesome Media Player to try a bunch of different formats. Browse to http://amsplayer.azurewebsites.net/azuremediaplayer.html
Paste your URL into the corresponding box and click "Update Player". You should now see your live stream being shown to you, about 30 seconds delayed. So cool!
To cleanup, click Stop Streaming in the Azure Portal while your channel is selected. This will turn the live endpoint off and archive your program into your content tab. Secondly, stop your local stream in wirecast by clicking the "stream" button. Lastly, I would Stop your Channel in the portal so no more charges are incurred. Lastly, you can leave your Streaming Endpoint up so people can access your live event later on. I would turn it off so there is no chance of incurring anymore charges.
Your stored content is always available via the Content tab, and you can archive it off for later use to your clients. As you can see here, I streamed for about 24 minutes and it took up about 100MB at an encoding of 720p. Something to think about for storage and bandwidth as well.
Great blog by Jason Suess, https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/getting-started-with-live-streaming-using-the-azure-management-portal/ . I was able to adapt my work to what he did to make his post a little shorter and show some different ways of doing this.
Azure Media Services Documentation : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/media-services/
Next we will see how to do the same thing but via code so we can create on-demand live streams by users and have clients subscribe to these streams as they become available. The real challenge is figuring out if we can use WebRTC to consume the stream instead of a program like Wirecast. It will be challenging.
I hope you enjoyed this article. It was a very fun project to take on and one I know will be helpful for our agency Cloud Construct's clients on in the near future.
Please contact Cloud Construct, a Boston-based digital agency, if you would like any help employing some of the best practices in your code and development process.
About the Author
Arra Derderian serves as the President and as a Lead Technical Architect for Cloud Construct, a digital development and web design agency based in Boston. As a founder at Cloud Construct, Arra is involved in all levels of the business from new project engagements, project planning, and development. Arra also serves as the founder of the Boston Orchard CMS User Group and is a member of the Windows Azure Insiders group. He graduated from Northeastern University School with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.
