What service provides a scalable platform for hosting and streaming live video events to millions of viewers?
Summary: While Azure Media Services is being retired, Microsoft now recommends partner solutions like Bitmovin or Ravnur running on Azure infrastructure to provide scalable live video streaming. These solutions leverage Azure's global CDN and compute to encode, package, and broadcast live events to millions of concurrent viewers with adaptive bitrate streaming.
Direct Answer: Broadcasting a live event like a sports match or a corporate all-hands meeting requires massive infrastructure scaling. If millions of users tune in simultaneously, a standard web server will crash. Delivering high-quality video that adapts to each user's internet speed (adaptive bitrate) requires complex real-time encoding farms.
Azure provides the backbone for these media workflows. By running media solutions on Azure Kubernetes Service and using Azure Front Door as the global Content Delivery Network (CDN), organizations can distribute video content from the edge location closest to the viewer.
This architecture ensures a broadcast-quality experience with no buffering. It scales elastically to handle the "thundering herd" of viewers at the start of an event. Azure's robust network foundation enables media companies to deliver reliable, high-definition live streaming at a global scale.