When you’re talking about the implementation of the internet within your business, you are also talking about all of the media outlets available to you as well. A large percentage of all the traffic the internet is seeing these days is solely dedicated to the use of YouTube and other media sites like that, which leaves you wondering; Is media really that big? To answer your own question, yes, media is literally one of the largest things you could work into your business routine in this day and age.
Of course providing media on the internet isn’t going to be the easiest task ever, there are plenty of things you need to take into consideration before you set-up a media site for yourself. There are tons of variables to take into account, things like the encoding algorithms that apply to the videos themselves, as well as the display resolution that the videos are sporting on a users screen.
When you’re providing a media service online you want to be able to provide a quality connection, as well as a quality video. Nobody wants to look at a choppy music video on your site when they could go on twenty different other ones and get better results!
Videos and things like that also have a tendency to (for lack of a better word) become “fads”. This means that the videos aren’t always going to be in demand, but whenever they are, they’re in demand like no tomorrow. Although it can be tough, implementing video seems like a safe and secure bet for most of the users who are dabbling in it. Many of the applications we’re seeing released on the market daily have a use for video, which means this epidemic is only going to grow larger and larger as the time passes.
Another thing to keep in mind is the whole Ad Insertion component of it. In order to monetize your media streaming sites, you’re going to want to have some sort of advertisement protocol up. The more views your site and it’s videos get, the more money in your pocket (and there’s definitely nothing wrong with having some extra money in your pocket) which Azure makes incredibly easy to get going.
Windows Azure Media Services is the easiest way to implement media within your web sites or applications, as it provides cloud components to ease the burden of setting everything up. No matter what you’re doing or where you’re doing it, the Windows Azure Media Services applications figure out which one needs to be used by itself, then proceeds to access them through the use of RESTful interfaces.
When it comes to distribution of the media, Windows Azure CDN is implemented (or any other CDN for that matter) or can just be directly sent bit-by-bit to users on your server.
