In conjunction with the announcement of Azure App Service, we are excited to bring the power of Cloud APIs for your media applications. Azure Media Services Connector API App allows any technical user or developer to discover, host and manage API’s in the cloud and provides you with a simple and powerful interface to access Azure Media Services. With this you will be able to create end-to-end media workflows which abstracts the complexities of the video pipeline and allows you to focus on building value-added solutions. 

Here I will walk you through the APIs which are exposed and how to get provisioned with the Azure Media Services Connector.

APIs

Azure Media Services Connector exposes the following resources via the REST API:

• Video – The Video entity represents the set of videos available within a given account
• Thumbnail – A Thumbnail entity represents an image derived from a frame within a video.
• Formats – The Formats endpoint is used to retrieve a list of supported input video formats.

 

Each resource may support GET, PUT, POST, or DELETE APIs, based on the scenarios supported as detailed in the sections below.

Video

Operation	Discussion	Request URI
GET	Retrieves a Video object	/api/Videos/{id}
POST	Create a Video	/api/Videos
DELETE	Deletes a video which you have previously uploaded	/api/Videos/{id}
POST	Client signal that they have completed uploading to Azure BLOB by calling the MarkComplete action on a video	/api/Videos/{id}/MarkComplete
GET	Client retrieve a key token for use in AES128 content protection mode playback interaction by calling the AuthorizationToken endpoint	/api/Videos/{id}/AuthorizationToken
GET	Clients use this to check if the content is ready for streaming	/api/Videos/{api}/Status
GET	Clients can use this to get the Playback URL of a video	/api/Videos/{id}/PlaybackEndpoint?endpointType={‘Streaming, HLS, DASH, Progressive’}

Thumbnail

Operation	Discussion	Request URI
GET	This entity represents a thumbnail image derived from a video	/api/Videos/{id}/Thumbnails

Formats

Operation	Discussion	Request URI
GET	The Formats endpoint is used to retrieve a list of supported input video formats	/api/Formats

 

How to get started?

1. Go to Azure Marketplace here

2. Select Azure Media Services Connector from API Apps category in Marketplace

3. Access to Azure Media Services Connector occurs via a Media account. The account is the highest scope for accessing Media Services, and is the basis for authentication. As a first step, to get a new account created, you will need to email Media App Accounts, with your name, organization name and contact details to get the Account Name and Account Key. In future, this process will be automated and you will not have to request it via this manual process. You should hear back from us in a short time with the account name and key.

4. Once you have the credentials, click on ‘Create’ and enter the account credentials in the Package Settings as shown in the picture below

5. The backend for this service currently resides in US-East. When selecting Location during provisioning, please select East US. Other data centers are not available yet but will be enabled in the coming weeks.

6. Click on ‘Create’ and your Azure Media Services Connector will be provisioned. Here is how it will look

7. If you want to allow “Public Anonymous Access” to this, you can change the settings here

Then hit the URL with the operations from the API definition.

API Reference Documents

Please refer here for the detailed API Documentation on how to get started with Azure Media Services Connector.

Next Steps

In the next few weeks, we will be enabling the backend for Azure Media Services Connector in all regions to improve your experience with media processing. For more information on Azure API Apps, check out the original Azure App Service announcement here.

We hope you enjoy this new feature of Azure Media Services, and please leave a comment if you have any questions/feedback or reach out to me at ashish.chawla@microsoft.com