Introduction To Windows Azure Media Services

Windows Azure Media Services is a web service which can store, transcode and distribute client's video. The video storage is backed by Windows Azure Storage Blob Storage. A typical use case is CMS ( content management system). Using Windows Azure Media Services, CMS may be able to manage large amount of videos just like texts. Windows Azure Media Services exposes REST endpoints which enables any programming language to leverage it. In practice, Microsoft has shipped SDK written in .NET and Java for it. Two most widely used enterprise programming language.

The REST endpoint of Windows Azure Media Services is based on OData protocol. One core concept in OData is called Entity. This blog post summarize a few important entities, the operations on these core entities comprisis the major function of Windows Azure Media Services.

Asset

    An asset is a unit of media files. It is the basic unit of Windows Azure Media Services. One Asset can contain multiple AssetFiles. 

AssetFile

   An asset file is a single video file stored in Windows Azure Media Services. 

AccessPolicy 

   An AccessPolicy is a set of rules specify the permission and timespan of the permission. 

Locator 

    A locator is a http access end point of specified asset. A locator can be created from one asset and one access policy. 

A simple program can be created using the above four entities to distribute your video globally. 

Task

    A Task is a transcoding task. The input parameter including the input asset, output asset and the ID of the media processor. 

Job

    A Job is a set of Tasks logically associated together. Task entity cannot be created directly, it can only be created as childrens of Job even if the Job only has one Task.