Streaming video online is an effective way to communicate to large numbers of people.

But there are challenges. You need to get your video online in a format that is accessible to others and make it available to your audience.

You may also want to provide closed captioning for hearing impaired users; analyze the contents of your audio and video; reduce latency with a Content Delivery Network; and secure your media appropriately.

Azure Media Services provides all these capabilities and does in a highly scalable, fault-tolerant way.

The first step in using Azure Media Services is to create an Azure Media Services Account. As with most, services in Azure, you can create an Azure Media Services Account in the Azure Portal by clicking the [Create a resource] button (Fig. 1); then search for and select "Media Services", as shown in Fig. 2.

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Fig. 1

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Fig. 2

The "Create media service account" dialog displays, as shown in Fig. 3.

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Fig. 3

At the "Subscription" dropdown, select the Subscription that will contain this Media Service Account. Most of you will have only one subscription.

At the "Resource group" field, select a Resource Group to contain this account or click the "Create new" link to create a new Resource Group to contain it. A Resource Group is a logical grouping of Azure resources, making it easier for you to manage them together.

At the "Media Services account name" field, enter a unique name for this account. This name must be between 3 and 24 characters in length and can contain only numbers and lowercase letters.

At the "Location" dropdown, select a location in which to store this service. When selecting a location, consider the location of your users and any potential legal issues.

At the "Storage Account" field, select an existing storage account from the dropdown or click the "Create a new storage account" link to create a new storage account. This storage account will hold all the assets for your service, including audio files, video files, and metadata files. Unless I have media files that already exist, I tend to prefer to keep all my Azure Media Services assets in their own storage account.

Click the [Review + create] button to display the summary page, as shown in Fig. 4.

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Fig. 4

Check the "I have all the rights to use the content/file" checkbox and click the [Create] button to begin creating you Azure Media Services Account.

When the service account is complete, the confirmation shown in Fig. 5 displays.

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Fig. 5

Click the [Go to resource] button to navigate to the "Overview" blade of the Media Service account, as shown in Fig. 6.

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Fig. 6

In this article, you learned the advantages of Azure Media Services and how to create an Azure Media Services account. In the next article, I will show you how to add media assets to this account.