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RSS feedJuly 2023
Retirement notice: Azure Media Services is being retired on 30 June 2024
Target retirement date: June 30, 2024
Azure Media Services will be retired on 30 June 2024 - transition to a Microsoft partner solution or Azure Video Indexer
November 2022
General availability: 12 months free services for new Azure PAYG customers
With an Azure free account, you can explore with free amounts of 55+ always free services.
September 2022
General availability: Azure Media Services low-latency live streaming
Azure Media Services is announcing the general availability of low-latency HLS with glass-to-glass latency between 4-7 seconds with support for automatic transcriptions and digital rights management.
March 2021
General availability: Media Services adds new "StandBy" mode for Live Events to speed up start times from warm state
Media Services Live Events now support a lower-cost "StandBy" mode to allow you to pre-allocate live streaming at a lower cost. You can now use the new standby mode to transition quickly to a "Running" state faster than starting from cold creation and reduces your operational costs.
General availability: Media Services introduces new security features
Media Services introduces new security features available in the 2020-05-01 version of the Azure Media Services API allowing you to now bring your own encryption keys, and configure trusted storage using System Managed Identities.
General availability: Azure Media Services – HEVC encoding support in Standard Encoder
You can now use High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or H.265 in the Standard Encoder. This new feature is available for Content Aware encoding, Adaptive Bitrate encoding, and creating your own custom transforms. Using HEVC along with supported decoding devices will provide you with the ability to deliver streaming content at reduced bitrates while maintaining the same video quality compared to H.264/AVC. This in turn will help reduce overall delivery costs through a CDN, and allow your viewers to receive higher quality streams on constrained networks.
February 2021
Update your Azure Media Services REST API and SDKs to v3 by 29 February 2024
Target retirement date: February 29, 2024
We’ll be retiring version 2 of the Azure Media Services API and the associated client SDKs on 29 February 2024.
June 2020
Live Video Analytics now in public preview
Live Video Analytics is a platform to capture, record, and analyze live video and publish the results (video and/or video analytics), enabling intelligent video applications.
Azure Media Services now supports Live Transcription preview in additional regions
Live transcription is a new feature of Azure Media Services v3 APIs, wherein you can enhance the streams delivered to viewers with machine-generated text that is transcribed from spoken words in the audio feed. This feature was first announced in Nov 2019 and we are now making this available in additional regions.
May 2020
Azure Media Services is now available in Switzerland and Germany
Announcing the general availability of Media Services in Switzerland (North and West) and Germany (North, West Central) regions.
February 2020
We are retiring Azure Media Analytics preview processors on June 1, 2020
Target retirement date: June 01, 2020
We’ve made significant investments to Video Optical Character Recognition, Face Detector, and Content Moderator, as a part of the general availability of Azure Media Services: Video Indexer.
November 2019
Azure Media Services now supports Live Transcription in preview
Azure Media Services provides a platform which you can use to ingest, transcode, and dynamically package and encrypt your live video for delivery. Live Transcriptions is a new feature in the Azure Media Services v3 APIs, wherein you can enhance the streams delivered to your viewers with machine-generated text that is transcribed from spoken words in the audio feed.
October 2019
Azure Media Indexer is being retired
Target retirement date: January 01, 2023
A year ago we announced the general availability of Azure Video Indexer, which is built on the capabilities of Azure Media Analytics, Azure Search, and Cognitive Services. This enables you to extract a rich set of machine learning insights based on multiple channels of your media files, all integrated together in one call and on a shared timeline.
September 2019
Public Preview - Video Indexer Multilingual identification and transcription
Automatic spoken language identification leverages machine learning technology to identify the different languages used in a media asset.
Public Preview - Video Indexer Animated Character Detection
Azure Media Services Video Indexer supports detection, grouping, and recognition of characters in animated content.
Legacy media encoders are being retired on November 30, 2019
Target retirement date: November 30, 2019
We've been making steady improvements to the robustness, reliability, performance, price and capabilities of the encoding features of Azure Media Services.
August 2019
Media Services is now available in both South Africa regions
Media Services is now available in South Africa North and South Africa West regions
June 2019
Premium Live Encoder now supports streaming at 1080p and 30 frames per second
The Premium Live Encoder for Azure Media Services now allows you to live encode streaming content at a resolution of 1080p and up to 30 frames per second.
Media Services is now available in Korea Region
Media Services is now available in Korea Central and Korea South.
May 2019
Premium Live Encoder now supports streaming at 1080p and 30 fps
The Premium Live Encoder for Azure Media Services now allows you to live-encode streaming content at a resolution of 1080p and up to 30 frames per second.
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