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Azure Media Services v3 overview

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Media Services logo v3

Warning

Azure Media Services will be retired June 30th, 2024. For more information, see the AMS Retirement Guide.

Azure Media Services is a cloud-based platform that enables you to build solutions that achieve broadcast-quality video streaming, enhance accessibility and distribution, analyze content, and much more. Whether you're an app developer, a call center, a government agency, or an entertainment company, Media Services helps you create apps that deliver media experiences of outstanding quality to large audiences on today's most popular mobile devices and browsers.

What can I do with Media Services?

Media Services lets you build a variety of media workflows in the cloud. Some examples of what you can do with Media Services include:

  • Deliver videos in various formats so they can be played on a wide variety of browsers and devices. For both on-demand and live streaming delivery to various clients (mobile devices, TV, PC, and so on), the video and audio content needs to be encoded and packaged appropriately.
  • Stream live sporting events to a large audience, like soccer, baseball, college and high school sports, and more.
  • Broadcast public meetings and events, like town halls, city council meetings, and legislative bodies.
  • Analyze recorded videos or audio content. For example, to achieve higher customer satisfaction, organizations can extract speech-to-text and build search indexes and dashboards. Then, they can extract intelligence around common complaints, sources of complaints, and other relevant data.
  • Create a subscription video service and stream DRM protected content when a customer (for example, a movie studio) needs to restrict the access and use of proprietary copyrighted work.
  • Deliver offline content for playback on airplanes, trains, and automobiles. A customer might need to download content onto their phone or tablet for playback when they anticipate to be disconnected from the network.
  • Enable Azure CDN to achieve large scaling to better handle instantaneous high loads (for example, the start of a product launch event).

Note

Want to deliver streaming media with low latency? See the Low Latency HLS (LL-HLS) article and the Live streaming best practices guide.

How can I get started with v3?

Learn how to encode and package content, stream videos on-demand, broadcast live, and analyze your videos with Media Services v3. Tutorials, API references, and other documentation show you how to securely deliver on-demand and live video or audio streams that scale to millions of users.

Review Fundamental concepts which includes important concepts, like packaging, encoding, and protecting, and Developing with Media Services v3 APIs which includes information on accessing APIs, naming conventions, and so on.

Quickstarts

Quickstarts allow you to try out Media Services using the Azure portal.

SDKs

See the documentation for setting up your environment in Quickstarts, then start developing with Azure Media Services v3 client SDKs.

Ask questions, give feedback, get updates

Check out the Azure Media Services community article to see different ways you can ask questions, give feedback, and get updates about Media Services.

Compliance, privacy and security

Important

Read the Compliance, privacy and security document before using Azure Media Services to deliver your media content.

Get help and support

You can contact Media Services with questions or follow our updates by one of the following methods: