We’re excited to announce General Availability of Azure Media Services Content Protection (AES and DRM) service. Content protection service enables you to secure your Video-on-demand or live stream content with AES or Microsoft PlayReady. We believe content security is a key building block towards monetization of video. As outlined in a recent blog post by Netflix, piracy is one of the “biggest competitors” for video content distributors and providers. With options to deliver your content using industry standard protection, we hope to help our customers be successful in secure delivery of their content.

We are rolling out this capability in multiple centers worldwide and adding more soon. We already have customers like Office 365 video making use of this service to deliver secure video streaming to enterprise customers. During the preview that lasted four months, we had more than 1000 customers sign up for our services and half of them are already actively using the service. We want to express our gratitude and thank everyone who utilized this service during preview and gave us valuable feedback.

With GA, we now guarantee 99.9% Azure Service-Level Agreement (SLA) for all our customers.

Cutting-edge Media Technology: dynamically encrypt your media content on the fly

Azure Media Services is the only cloud media solution provider in the market that offers encryption on the fly, for both VOD and live stream. Compared to traditional way of static encryption and package, it saves storage cost by only store one copy of standard multiple bitrate MP4 and dynamically encrypt the bits on the fly. Also, if your content key is compromised, you no longer needs to re-encrypt the entire library but to simply call APIs on our service to change the key.

 
Leading industry standards: PlayReady encrypted MPEG-DASH playback through EME

More and more browsers are starting to support the HTML standard around Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME provides a standard way to playback encrypted content in HTML5. With this service we have enabled PlayReady common encryption (CENC) on MPEG-DASH stream, which is supported on various player, such as DASH.JS reference client. We encourage you to give it a try by clicking the video link below:

Authorizing video content:  easy integration with known services such as Azure Active Directory

With Content Protection service, we support Token-authentication service on our key/license delivery. With GA, we have also added support for JWT tokens. In addition, to make it even easier we have released sample code (and blog) to help you easily utilize Active Directory or ACS to authorize access to the AES keys or PlayReady licenses.

Simplicity: configure a full-blown Key/license delivery service within minutes

Setting up and configuring a full-blown key/license server on premises could take up days. We simplified this process greatly – now, you can set everything up in a matter of minutes.

We hope you enjoy this new feature of Azure Media Services, and please leave a comment if you have any questions/feedback.