Media Services In the Cloud
Recently I was brushing up on my C# with the latest 'free' Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, I noticed azure cloud integration and decided to have a further look as it would be interesting to be able to put some of my 'programs' into the cloud so having made plunge and created a free account (one month free) I noticed...
'Media Services'
This caught my attention as encoding/segmenting is the cornerstone for any video based CDN network, so I took it for a spin and although basic it shows what the future should be for a cloud/container based media service, spin up took minutes and I only clicked 3/4 buttons/options. Once running there was a well documented SDK (C# or Java) that I could use or I could manually upload and test (in theory you could manage it completely manually).
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/media-services/
After uploading a TS video (I believe there is a limit of 200MB at the moment) I was then able to apply a specific video encoding profile and after a few minutes this segmented adaptive bit-rate video was available for streaming.
I think this is a very good start to what could be a killer application and points the way to how easy it should be to deploy and communicate with. Using azure entirely it's possible with a little effort to have a video/CDN built within a matter of a few weeks.
Obviously there are dangers here but the approach alone should be modelled by anyone expecting or wanting to be around in the next 10 years.
No, for the most part the deployment and provisioning shoud be as simple as clicking a button which the azure cloud gives you, but obviously it could be done the same and not tied into the azure cloud :)
It doesn't have to terribly complicated does it?