Migrate From Azure Media Services: A Detailed Guide

Microsoft has announced that it is going to retire Azure Media Services by June 30, 2024. Hence, if you are using AMS for your business, you have only a few more weeks in hand to migrate to some other alternative platform. 

In this blog, we will tell you about the available AMS alternatives, why Muvi Flex can be the best choice, and how you can migrate to Muvi Flex very easily without any potential downtime. So, let’s get started. 

Which Services Are Going to Retire With Azure Media Services?

Azure Media Services offers a robust and dynamic cloud-based platform for building literally anything related to audio and video streaming. It is packed with multiple core features and services, including:

• Encoding: Azure Media Services provides a comprehensive video and audio encoding service that helps in converting your raw content into stream-ready content. They convert your content into multiple streaming device-compatible formats and compress them to reduce their sizes. They also break the content into multiple content files of different resolutions. 

• On-Demand Streaming: Azure Media Services helps you deliver pre-recorded videos as on-demand content to your viewers. 

• Live Streaming: Using AMS, the broadcasters can live stream sports matches, events, webinars, conferences, online workshops and tutorials, and more! Similarly, you can deliver excellent live streams to your customers across the globe with zero buffering using Muvi Live too. So, if you are considering migrating your live streaming setup from Azure Media Services, do try out Muvi Live. No upfront payment, just pay as you go!

• Content Protection and DRM: Azure Media Services offers advanced content protection features. They encrypt your content so that the hackers cannot steal it when they are traveling from the server to the source. They also restrict unwanted access through Digital Rights Management.
• Player: The Azure Media Player offered by AMS easily integrates with all your websites and apps. It helps you deliver and play your video and audio content across different types of devices and platforms. 

Apart from the listed features, Azure Media Services helped its users in the overall delivery and management of their audio and video content. Their analytics helped you keep track of audience engagement across all your content. 

But with Azure Media Services retiring this June, all of these features and services will also retire. Hence, all the users of AMS and its broad spectrum of services will have to migrate to another platform or service before June 30, so that their viewers can keep accessing their content without any downtime or disruption. 

Effortless migration with ZERO data loss, ZERO downtime! Click here to migrate to Muvi Flex today!

Migrate from Azure Media Services: Alternatives Available

As an Azure Media Service user, you must be looking for good alternatives to migrate to, right? Well, the following alternatives are by far the most prominent options available:

1. Muvi Flex
2. Bitmovin
3. MediaKind
4. Ravnur

When we tried to do a quick comparison of all the features these four alternatives have to offer, we got the result as tabulated below:

From the above comparison table, we can clearly see that Muvi Flex offers the most user-friendly video CMS and the most extensive features among all the available alternatives. Also, migrating to Muvi Flex is super easy and requires minimal effort from your side. 

Muvi Flex: Built For Your Business

Muvi Flex is an all-in-one video hosting platform built to be your business’s central video hub. You can host, manage, and share all your video and media assets from a single dashboard. 

Multi-DRM protects your videos and audio content from any type of piracy attempt. Their robust cloud CDN infrastructure ensures that you can deliver your videos to even the most distant and remote locations across the globe. Built-in encoding and transcoding engine makes sure that your videos are always ready for digital distribution. 

Muvi Flex comes with Muvi Player and Player SDK, both of which are fully customizable. You can leverage the extensive Muvi Product suite to deliver stunning live streams using Muvi Live. 

Why Migrate to Muvi Flex?

If you are an Azure Media Services customer, you must be looking for something that can deliver all the extensive services that were once delivered by AMS, with equal ease of use. Right? Then, Muvi Flex fits in that pedestal perfectly. 

Muvi Flex offers all the features you will ever need, including:

• Multiple Encoding Profiles: Muvi Flex’s built-in encoding system lets you choose from multiple encoding profiles. Hence, you can choose encoding format and video resolution as per your business needs. Also, you can upload the video in any format or size, our encoding engine will take care of the rest. 

• Multi-DRM Security: Muvi Flex offers multi-DRM security so that your content remains protected from piracy on multiple browsers and devices. Along with DRM, you can also enable dynamic and forensic watermarking and screengrab protection to ensure the overall safety of your content. 

• Endless Customization: Muvi Flex allows you to do endless customizations. Our dedicated customer support engineers help you achieve all your business needs. You can add your own branding to the player, request additional features, and more!

• Detailed Analytics: Muvi Flex lets you track all the engagements and views on your content from a single place. These insights and data help you make better business decisions. You can also download the analytics data for offline analysis. 

• Customizable Video Player: Muvi Flex’s fully customizable HTML5 video player lets your viewers play the videos over any device effortlessly. 

On top of that, the migration process to Muvi Flex is extremely simple and easy. You just need to raise a migration request and everything else will be handled by our migration team. We will ensure smooth migration. 

How to Migrate From Azure Media Services to Muvi Flex?

For our customers, migrating from Azure Media Services to Muvi Flex is extremely simple and involves only three steps:

👉Step 1: Visit this page and raise a migration request for migrating to Muvi Flex. Alternatively, you can also get in touch with our migration team via the Contact Us page. 

👉Step 2: Our migration team will receive the request, analyze it, and get in touch with you for further details. 

👉Step 3: Once we get all the necessary details, we will not bug you again. Everything else will be handled by Muvi Flex!

Now, let’s take you through our usual migration process. Our experienced migration team first performs a detailed examination of your data and audio-visual content present in Azure Media Services. This examination helps them in taking the necessary steps to migrate the data and content efficiently. 

Once the examination is complete, we start preparing your data and content for migration. After preparing the data, we run a trial data migration just to check the efficiency of our setup. We also request our custom teams to validate the trial results.  Once we are satisfied with it, we proceed with the real migration. 

Our entire migration process is explained in the infographic below:

Things We Take Care of While Migrating

While migrating your content and data from any platform, we always take care of the following things:

1. We ensure that all your data and content remain absolutely safe and protected while migrating them from Azure Media Service to Muvi Flex. 
2. We make sure to migrate your data without any runtime errors. That is why we provide extended go-live support and run multiple trial migrations before the actual migration. 
3. We make sure the testing, onboarding, and going live is as smooth as possible.
4. After migrating your audio and video content, we also encode and transcode them into multiple resolutions and formats. 
5. We try to complete the migration process as fast as possible. 
6. We make sure that your current consumers and users do not notice any downtime while the migration process is going on. 

To Sum Up

If you are an Azure Media Service user looking to migrate to other platforms, then Muvi Flex will prove to be the perfect choice for you. You can migrate your existing data and content within the least time, by raising just a simple migration request. You won’t have to worry about the technicalities as we will handle everything. So don’t let time run out. Raise your migration request here.