azure media service

Question

Hello,

We are using Azure Media Serices for an online video streaming platform.The issue we are facing are as follows:

1. Both user and azure services are in the same locaion/region but they are facing slow buffering issue.
2. I would like to restrict the content being able to record by any means using a recorder etc.

Kindly suggest how can we achieve this ?

Thanks

Answer 1

So many additional questions.

1) Are you talking about a live stream to many viewers, or are you talking about a single on-demand stream?
2) If there are a lot of viewers, and you are only running on the "standard" streaming endpoint, you should note that you will be bandwidth limited on the egress side and you should go into the Azure portal and monitor the egress bandwidth as well as the CPU load on the streaming endpoint. Also keep in mind that that streaming endpoints are "shared" resources - meaning you could potentially have a noisy neighbor on the same virtual machine that is causing some issues with the streaming endpoint at a give time. To be certain that you are not being affected by a noisy neighbor or lack of resources, you would want to switch to use Premium Streaming endpoints, and then adjust the number of endpoints to match the egress demand for the audience size you are trying to reach.
3) If this is a live audience, you should definitely enable the CDN on the Streaming Endpoint, and then go to the supplemental CDN portal to enable "Streaming optimizations" and Origin shield if you are expecting a very large audience of viewers (more than a few thousand typically). You can also file a support ticket to ask for this to be enabled on your CDN profile. See the article - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/media-services/latest/stream-enable-origin-shield-how-to
4) There is no 100% secure way to restrict content from being recorded. You can use DRM on devices that are hardened for specific DRM systems, like PlayReady level 3000 or FairPlay on an Apple device, but Widevine DRM for Android devices is going to have some holes, and won't be secure 100% of the time for screen recorders or screen scraping. So there are not any solutions that can work completely to avoid screen scraping. There are a few articles out there that cover that situation. You would have to limit playback to only a few trusted devices that support PLayReady SL-3000, Fairplay, and Widevine L1 (hardware based DRM in a Trusted execution environment).