Cost per video minute or second on Windows Azure [closed]

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I'm going to be building a website on the Azure platform that has extensive use of video uploads using the Windows Azure Media Services.

I'm trying to figure out how much a video would cost after encoding to all of the supported formats as well to be able to store the video in Windows Azure storage per month. E.g. 1 minute of video is 'xMB' in size and will cost '$x' in Azure Storage and will be '$x' for encoding.

Is there anywhere or anyway I can find out this information?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here's an excerpt from a discussion I had with the Media Services team some time ago about pricing (just my comments). Basically, Azure Media Services is more useful for direct content providers, think Netflix or Hulu, where you would have a vested interest in protecting access to content and every piece of content makes you money.

For a YouTube-style service it doesn't compete well compared to other encoders, since the costs (ignoring bandwidth used to actually stream, of course) are pretty much entirely determined by usage of the Media Encoder.

Below is a pricing scenario I worked out, based on my understanding of Media Services' pricing. This is ignoring bandwidth costs, just focusing on the encoding:

For one 45 second, 50MB HD WMV video, converted to a 5 bitrate set of SD mp4's (about 28MB when done), that's a total of 78MB data processed. So:

@ $1.99/GB: $0.155. As far as I know, using the Media Encoder to get thumbnails requires creating a separate Task, with a separate input asset, effectively duplicating the input cost just to get thumbnails. Waiting to use the encoded asset first (instead of the original 50MB uploaded video) would make this cheaper, costing about another $0.056, totaling about $0.21. This is assuming we stay in the 0.5TB/mo realm of pricing for a while.

By comparison, other services like ZenCoder ignore the source video and charge only per minute of output video ($0.05 per minute at the lower-use end), with multiple outputs at a 20% discount. So if I specified an output of five different bitrates (about the same as the H264 Adaptive Bitrate MP4 Set SD 16x9 configuration Media Services offers) on the same 45 second video, the cost comes to $0.15.

If I choose to ignore bitrate sets and just go for 480p, the costs drop, but for Media Services I'm still paying $0.155 to send the source video to the encoder. ZenCoder only charges for output runtime, so I'd only pay about $0.03. There's another competitor built on the CPUsage platform called GridVid.Me that looks even cheaper (https://gridvid.me/index/more-info) .

So you can see how long-form video encoding scales with both of those plans; with Media Services it scales with quality, which I like very much, but because it charges for the source video it also puts me at the mercy of whatever people are uploading to it.