Azure media services price calculation

Question

I want to use azure media services for video streaming but the azure docs are quite ambiguous regarding the pricing. Kindly let me know:

• what are Streaming units
• How do we calculate the cost with streaming units?
• What is the data transfer cost and how is it associated with streaming units?
• Keeping these into consideration if I have 10 videos uploaded, 100 watch minutes, how to calculate the cost?
• If we are using CDN with streaming endpoint, will streaming endpoint and CDN both be billed?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Several of these questions are answered on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/media-services/latest/stream-streaming-endpoint-concept, but for completeness I'll answer directly here. If you use a Standard streaming endpoint Streaming Units are not needed. The endpoint autoscales up to 600 Mbps. A Premium streaming endpoint does use Streaming Units. These are dedicated to your account and allow you to scale beyond 600 Mbps.

The cost is listed on https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/media-services/ (click on "Streaming" 1/3 of the way down the page). The pricing is simply related to the amount of time the streaming endpoint is in the running state. Whether a client is streaming or not doesn't matter.

The primary cost related to streaming is the data egress or CDN egress. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/ and https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/ respectively. The cost is based on the amount of data transferred, not the length of the video. This is because videos can be encoded at different bitrates.

Using the pricing calculator at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?service=media-services can help.