Video, Web, Technologies…
Notes and comments on new technologies world by Olivier NOEL
Release of cloud services to manage media contents
The beginning of this year 2013 is full of news in the transcoding cloud world. The two main platforms announced the release of their own solutions :
- Microsoft with Azure Media Services (the 22th of January)
- one week later Amazon with Elastic Transcoder (the 29th of January)
I made some posts to introduce Azure Media Services (part 1, part 2) available after May 2012. Here is a quick overview to compare those different services.
Platform Models
Here is a quick overview of each platform models.
Amazon Elastic Transcoding
Azure Media Services
Functionnalities
This table exposes the differents features supported by each solutions.
| Azure Media Services | Elastic Transcoding | |
|---|---|---|
| API | REST | REST |
| Web console | Yes | Yes |
| Input Audio Codec | AC-3 AAC MP3 WMA | AAC |
| Input Video Codec | H.264 MPEG,MPEG2 VC-1 WMV | H.264 MPEG-2 3GP |
| Input Storage | Azure Storage Service | S3 |
| Input Format | FLV, MP4 MPEG,MPEG-2 3GP AVI VOB ISMV,WMV ASF | FLV MP4 MPEG-2 3GP AVI |
| Output Audio Codec | WMA AAC | AAC |
| Output Video Codec | VC1 H.264 | H.264 |
| Output Format | MP4 Smooth Streaming HTTP Live Streaming | MP4 |
| DRM support | PlayReady | |
| Delivery | Azure Storage Service Azure CDN | S3 CloudFront |
| Notifications | Yes |
Both solutions give the opportunity to create our own presets but there are also some generic presets available : for iDevices, for mobiles, generic profiles for SD and HD.
Pricing
Each cloud company applies its own pricing, not based on the same parameters.
On Amazon side, the price is based on output content duration. You have two prices :
- for Standard resolution (less than 720p) : 0,072€ per minute
- for HD (more than 720p) : cost of SD x 2 per minute
Microsoft, on the other side, applies on Azure Media Service a pricing on encoded GigaBytes processed. They count input and output datas. The pricing begins at 1,99$ by GigaBytes up to 5TeraBytes / Month. It reduces when you use more the service. This prices don’t include the storage on Amazon S3 or Azure Storage.
To choose the good one, you need to make a table to compare, it depends of your usage. I will try soon to expose one or more architectures based on those two services to manage video assets. So keep in touch 
Tags: amazon, azure, media services