Azure Video Indexer account types

This article gives an overview of Azure Video Indexer accounts types and provides links to other articles for more details.

Trial account

When starting out with Azure Video Indexer, click start free to kick off a quick and easy process of creating a trial account. No Azure subscription is required and this is a great way to explore Azure Video Indexer and try it out with your content. Keep in mind that the trial Azure Video Indexer account has a limitation on the number of indexing minutes, support, and SLA.

With a trial account, Azure Video Indexer provides:

  • up to 600 minutes of free indexing to the Azure Video Indexer website users and
  • up to 2400 minutes of free indexing to users that subscribe to the Azure Video Indexer API on the developer portal.

The trial account option is not available on the Azure Government cloud. For other Azure Government limitations, see Limitations of Azure Video Indexer on Azure Government.

When you have used up the free trial minutes or are ready to start using Video Indexer for production workloads, you can create a regular paid account which doesn't have minute, support, or SLA limitations. Account creation can be performed through the Azure portal (see Create an account with the Azure portal) or API (see Create accounts with API).

Azure Video Indexer unlimited accounts are Azure Resource Manager (ARM) based and unlike trial accounts, are created in your Azure subscription. Moving to an unlimited ARM based account unlocks many security and management capabilities, such as RBAC user management, Azure Monitor integration, deployment through ARM templates, and much more.

Billing is per indexed minute, with the per minute cost determined by the selected preset. For more information regarding pricing, see Azure Video Indexer pricing.

Create accounts

Classic accounts

Before ARM based accounts were added to Azure Video Indexer, there was a "classic" account type (where the accounts management plane is built on API Management.) The classic account type is still used by some users.

For more information on the difference between regular unlimited accounts and classic accounts, see Azure Video Indexer as an Azure resource.

Limited access features

This section talks about limited access features in Azure Video Indexer.

When did I create the account? Trial account (free) Paid account
(classic or ARM-based)
Existing VI accounts

created before June 21, 2022
Able to access face identification, customization and celebrities recognition till June 2023.

Recommended: Move to a paid account and afterward fill in the intake form and based on the eligibility criteria we will enable the features also after the grace period.
Able to access face identification, customization and celebrities recognition till June 2023*.

Recommended: fill in the intake form and based on the eligibility criteria we will enable the features also after the grace period.
New VI accounts

created after June 21, 2022
Not able the access face identification, customization and celebrities recognition as of today.

Recommended: Move to a paid account and afterward fill in the intake form. Based on the eligibility criteria we will enable the features (after max 10 days).
Azure Video Indexer disables the access face identification, customization and celebrities recognition as of today by default, but gives the option to enable it.

Recommended: Fill in the intake form and based on the eligibility criteria we will enable the features (after max 10 days).

*In Brazil South we also disabled the face detection.

For more information, see Azure Video Indexer limited access features.

Next steps

Make sure to review Pricing.