I'm feeling that this is a really dumb question, but my research tells me I have to create my own player. Is that true?
I have a link (publish URL) from Azure Media services like this: http://streamvideotest.streaming.mediaservices.windows.net/4ed49a08-f82d-462e-a05e-acea910064a5/7g91d5d8-b213-406c-90d8-75a3a5e2456d.ism/Manifest
Which I would like to hand out to a few people to play the video, or live feed at that channel. But you need some type of player? I've tried Windows Media Player (open URL), but that always fails.
It depends on which platform you want to reach.
If you are trying to play live stream on PC using Smooth Streaming, you could use Silverlight Player (http://smf.cloudapp.net/healthmonitor). Or if you want to stream DASH through modern browser (IE or Chrome), you could do it through HTML5 video tag natively.
If you are trying to reach out to iOS platform, you could do it natively by delivering HLS stream - append (format=m3u8-aapl) in your link above.
This is an article that describe different players you could use in different platform: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn223283.aspx.
As said, Azure Media Services has just rolled out Azure Media Player, which could detect the capability of the platform and feed in right streaming protocols by using the right player technology. please check out http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/15/announcing-azure-media-player/.
Thanks, Mingfei Yan