5 ways Microsoft’s Azure Media Services can help transform your business.

Sensitive / Data – CCTV, Medical, Legal scenarios

Simply put, services like YouTube© and Vimeo© aren’t appropriate for hosting and sharing sensitive content. Sensitive content needs to be wrapped with the right access, security, and compliance protocols. Organisations can use a platform like AMS to capture, store and distribute video content such as CCTV, medical or legal consultations, and live capture or IoT (Internet-of-things) scenarios.

Through a service like AMS, you’re fully in control over your video content and can manage the appropriate security, permissions, and compliance requirements as you see fit.

Corporate scenarios – Board meetings, workshops, BYOD, training

We’re now all accustomed to collaborating and communicating via platforms like Zoom and Teams, but what if you want to capture this content and make it available on-demand? Or do you want to create a bank of video content to support repeatable scalability and growth?

As with the example above, a lot of commercially sensitive information is discussed and shared. You really don’t want your competitors ‘accidentally’ stumbling across your ‘trade-secrets’ but you want to make it easy for your team to create and share knowledge with their peers.

At a high level, the process starts with media capture – this could be via pre-recorded content, or even live capture scenarios. The media is then made available to AMS via a Storage Account or via publicly accessible HTTP feeds. These assets are the raw and unencoded/transcoded representation of your data in the AMS solution, enabling flexibility with the content to meet yours and your intended audience’s needs.

Protecting your IP – Content production, DRM, Streaming services

Although storing and embedding your video data with services like YouTube© and Vimeo© can be considered an easy/cheap option, you can lose control over your IP.

If you’re a production, creative or media agency, or a company with a vast library of content, maintaining control and protecting your IP is critical.

With AMS you have full control of your data. It is YOUR IP. You will have complete ownership of the content, lifecycle, delivery, analytics, licensing, and content protection.

Depending on the use case, videos might be publicly accessible and available unlicensed, whereas Digital Rights Management (DRM) and content protection might also be necessary. These features are built-in and are supported by Microsoft PlayReady, Google Widevine, or Apple FairPlay licenses. End-to-end encryption is also available in DRM-free scenarios if the content is sensitive and needs to be protected in-transit and only served to authenticated and authorized audiences.

As well as maintaining full custody of your IP, you will want a seamless digital experience for your audience, so the more bespoke, personalised and easy-to-use the experience is, the more engagement and loyalty.

Consumers will be accessing your content via different device types and network connections. Delivering content in an optimal way across a wide range of options can therefore be particularly challenging. A sophisticated platform like AMS provides a wide selection of built-in Transforms to process your video assets. Transforms serve as recipes or pre-defined instructions to convert the media into a consumable output. The Transforms provide the ability to transcode the source data into a variety of bitrates so media players can adaptively stream the data in the most applicable and performant manner. Typically, this will be a laddered approach so that common resolutions are available from the source quality down through the standard resolutions (4K, 2K, 1080p, 720p, etc.). Well-known adaptive streaming protocols such as MPEG-DASH or HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) can then be used to seamlessly stream the content across a variety of devices and bandwidths.

Customer Metrics and Analytics

Analytics are important to support solution adoption and product viability. With AMS, video playback is available to gain valuable insights into how your content is being consumed. You can answer such questions as:

• How many users started the video?
• Was the entire video watched, or was it abandoned part way?
• Which bitrates are most common?
• In which regions are certain videos popular?

These metrics are trackable via Azure Monitor and visualized via Microsoft’s Power BI reports and dashboards providing powerful insights to the business.

For advanced video analysis enabling indexing, redaction, subtitling, and sentiment analysis, to produce metadata that aids in categorization, search, and zero-touch processing of large volumes of data.

Cognitive Analysis

Cognitive Analysis is next-level thinking when we’re talking about data and analytics. Here you’re not only processing the data but looking at the context and relationships. Cognitive analysis brings together the power of data capture and management, with Microsoft’s Machine Learning, AI and other data intelligence services.

To be honest, we’re just scratching the service with what’s possible. But imagine what you could do when you combine CCTV and IoT data through Cognitive Analysis? You could monitor behaviours, set up intelligent alerting for security purposes.

In summary, managing and delivering content is more than just posting a video. Leveraging a service like AMS may give your business the competitive edge needed and give you access to new opportunities, such as metrics, analytics, content protection, and cognitive analysis.