A Ready-Made Application for Video Streaming in Azure

Have a large number of videos stored on your Azure blob storage? And looking to stream them to your audience while keeping them in Azure?

Microsoft Azure was recognized as a leader in Cloud Infrastructure and Platform services by Gartner and is one of the best in terms of security and innovation. No wonder your organization trusts Azure and is looking for ways to carry out video streaming within the Azure infrastructure. 

Azure offers various services that you can utilize to stream your videos but this can be complicated. If you do an internet search to help solve your problem, you'll find complex articles asking you to do various steps.

Select a few options, write a bit of code, integrate various services, and do much more. You can avoid all of this and use VIDIZMO, which is an efficient video streaming platform that does it easily for you through various Azure services.

Choosing to use VIDIZMO for streaming in Azure is a classical build vs. buy decision. Buying a ready-made application saves your time and offers a more reliable product. VIDIZMO has been in the video streaming industry for 20 years and we have built solutions covering a range of video challenges in the enterprise. 

How VIDIZMO Enables Video Streaming Using Azure Infrastructure?

VIDIZMO EnterpriseTube is a Gartner-recognized end-to-end centralized video streaming and management solution for live and on-demand videos. It allows you to securely store, stream, search, share, control access and all other administrative aspects of your videos.

On top of it all, VIDIZMO is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and will allow you to achieve all these capabilities while remaining in the Azure environment.

VIDIZMO provides you the option to flexibly deploy on-premise, in any cloud of your choice, and even has a SaaS application. Hence, the platform can easily utilize Azure Services to package for you a centralized enterprise video platform that does encoding, transcoding, streaming, access management, secure database management and much more:

Azure Blob Storage

VIDIZMO allows you to store and stream your video from the Azure Blob Storage with data centers in more than 140 countries. It is a cost-effective solution that allows companies to securely store a massive amount of data (even in Petabytes) with an option for scaling up as needed. Microsoft is well-known for its security measures, given that it has more than 3,500 security experts and has the broadest support for various regulatory compliances.

Read More: How Secure is Microsoft Azure Cloud?

The globally spread data centers of Azure Blob Storage also provide options for different redundancy strategies through replication in different regions or zones with reliable backups and disaster recovery measures.

The Azure Blob Storage also offers storage tiers, which makes it a great option for creating a video archive. Non-frequently used videos can be moved to the cold or archive storage, whereas frequently used videos can remain on the hot storage.

Azure Media Services

Azure Media Services (AMS) is a scalable encoding and streaming service for live and on-demand videos with the capabilities of indexing videos for generating AI-powered video insights and content protection through dynamic encryption or DRM system of your choice.  

Encoding (AMS Transcoder)

AMS Transcoder supports video and audio data compression through its encoding capabilities to transcode videos into multiple renditions and media source files and protection formats to make them readily playable on different types of devices and browsers.

On top of it, during this process of encoding, video indexing is also performed. This can be easily enabled for your VIDIZMO videos and audios on Azure Blob Storage. You can also have multiple instances of encoding for different videos running simultaneously.

Streaming Server (AMS Dynamic Packaging)

AMS Dynamic Packaging to place all your video encoding profiles into a container called Packaging. These can then be delivered to various streaming protocols with an option for dynamic encryption. These streaming protocols include:

• HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)
• MPEG-DASH
• Microsoft Smooth Streaming

Dynamic Packaging is done intelligently just-in-time as a request is made through VIDIZMO's interactive video player to ensure adaptive bitrate streaming. The video content is directly streamed from the streaming endpoint or server (origin) to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) for further distribution accordingly. These videos can either be live content or on-demand video assets in your Media Services account.

Content Protection (Key Verification)

Another service offered through AMS is content protection through dynamic encryption with either the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-128) or the Digital Rights Management Systems (DRM) system of your choice:

• Microsoft PlayReady
• Google Widevine
• Apple FairPlay

Some other content protection services AMS delivers is the provision of AES keys and DRM licenses to authorized customers. VIDIZMO supports end-to-end encryption and uses a double encryption mechanism with another AES-128 encryption key on top of original content encryption.

These keys are protected in a highly secure database. These encrypted videos can then be securely viewed from any device or browser. VIDIZMO also offers TLS or SSL video streaming for in-transit content encryption.

Learn more about end-to-end encryption in VIDIZMO

Azure Video Indexer

Azure Video Indexer can either be utilized as a part of AMS or as a separate Azure service. VIDIZMO allows you to utilize Azure Video Indexer cost-effectively for the extraction of visual and audio data automated with the use of AI-powered video insights and other capabilities like:

• automatic machine-generated transcription and closed captions
• Indexing of spoken words through Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• Indexing of On-Screen Text through Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Face Recognition
• Speaker Identification
• Labels and Brands Detection
• Auto-generated tags
• Sentiment Analysis and Emotions detection

All these capabilities assist in generating actionable insights and improving content search and discoverability (keyword extraction) on VIDIZMO. All these insights and the transcription can be automatically translated into over 80 languages through Azure Video Indexer. The transcript can also be made 100% error-free by manually editing them on VIDIZMO.

Microsoft SQL Server

VIDIZMO application’s database can be managed on Microsoft SQL Server. Hence, all your primary data of your users, videos, tenants, etc., can be securely managed while remaining in the Azure environment to help reduce expenses with improved performance.

Azure CDN

Azure CDN is a service supported by VIDIZMO that you can opt for in combination with your streaming endpoint for faster and more reliable global video delivery due to the additional scalability.

Utilizing Azure CDN allows you to reduce your load time and improve speed responsiveness. It also works seamlessly alongside other Azure services like storage and media services. It also provides you protection from any security threats.

Hence, videos remain stored in your Origin streaming server in Azure Storage, while Microsoft has edge servers deployed globally. So, the server closest to the end-user pulls your content file and swiftly streams without any buffering.

Azure Active Directory

VIDIZMO offers single sign-on integration with all major authentication providers, including your company's Azure Active Directory. Utilize Azure AD SSO integration on VIDIZMO to securely maneuver between all the various Azure services and ensure that only authenticated users gain access to your video portal. Once configured, enabling, or disabling the SSO integration takes only a few seconds.

Flexible VIDIZMO Packages for Deployment in Microsoft Azure Cloud

Overall, VIDIZMO's video content management system can allow you to take advantage of most of Azure's services to ensure a secure high-quality video streaming and management experience for you. Let us now explore all the various VIDIZMO plans for deployment in Microsoft Azure Cloud:

VIDIZMO Application on Azure Marketplace

VIDIZMO is available as a pre-packaged application on Azure Marketplace for immediate use. You can either choose to deploy through the Pay-As-You-Go model or the Bring-Your-Own-License model. This option is best for those who already have an Azure account and businesses that do not require a customized video solution.

Read our blog on how to launch VIDIZMO virtual machine from the Azure Marketplace.

Shared Cloud (SaaS) in Azure Environment

VIDIZMO also offers its application as a ready-to-deploy SaaS on VIDIZMO Cloud in Azure Environment. This is a very cost-effective solution for small and medium-sized businesses. SaaS in Azure Government is also available for government and law-enforcement organizations.

Bring-Your-Own-Cloud

You can also opt for our dedicated single-tenant cloud option with your own Azure Commercial Account or Azure Government Account to deploy VIDIZMO's software. This can be either VIDIZMO-managed (VIDIZMO professional services) or self-managed based on your company's requirements. This option provides you much more flexibility in terms of having customized features, security, and administrative policies possible with the assistance of our professional services.

Conclusion

For enterprises with all or most of their video content stored on Azure blob storage, it is ideal to stay within the Azure environment and find a pre-packaged solution that can centrally manage and stream cost-effectively. VIDIZMO, being a Microsoft Gold Partner, is the ultimate Azure video streaming solution for this as it has multiple packages to meet varying levels of organizational needs.

If you are a Microsoft Seller and are looking for an enterprise video streaming solution for your Azure customers, then contact us today to engage in joint selling efforts.