Do I need azure media services for streaming a video to html5

Question

I am currently planing the total cost of hosting my videos on azure. After studying the pricing I noted that the costs for storing the data is actually much lower than the price for converting them. Unfortunately I will have many videos, but they won't be watched a lot. Therefore the relative cost for converting them to different formats is too high for me.

Now my question, do I actually need to convert the videos to different formats or wouldn't it be possible to send the video directly from the storage to the browser?

Answer 1

Yes, it's possible to send them directly from storage to the browser, just like it's possible to send any file that you make publicly accessible.

If you're going to store your videos in blob storage, just make sure you either mark the container as public or you generate SAS urls for each video that make them publicly accessible.

Answer 2

To send video's from storage to browser you can use SAS urls as Zain mentioned. You need to ask yourself what devices,bitrates your solution is targeting: which browsers, web only or web + mobile.

Probably you want your users be able to start watching video before it has been fully downloaded on client(progressive download). Make sure that you encoded it into desired bitrate and moov atom in the video is placed at the beginning of file - https://support.jwplayer.com/customer/portal/questions/12945932-mp4-file-progressive-play .

Based on your original video format and answers to above questions you might need to re-encode your videos and upload re-encoded version to server.