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Ravnur Media Services is a replacement for Azure Media Services VOD encoding and streaming functionality. It is a set of Azure services and resources that are deployed to your Azure tenant as a managed application from the Azure Marketplace. It has an API that mirrors the AMS API which means that you can use the existing Azure SDKs to work with RMS.
RMS does not include live streaming features. If you would like to replace AMS live streaming, please consider the Ravnur Live Streaming platform which delivers more features than AMS, together with an easy-to-use admin portal and public and private live streaming portals.
RMS is an application that runs completely in your own Azure tenant and is used only by you. It is not a metered service (i.e. upload one 10 minute video and pay a fee for that 10 minute video) running in an environment outside of your control. As such, it gives you flexibility, control, visibility and, for customers with moderate to heavy video workloads, economic benefits. RMS allows you to address data sovereignty and third party data sub-processor issues, control encoding and streaming parameters and integrates with your lower environments for dev and testing purposes. If you:
- Have moderate to heavy encoding requirements
- Must use multiple storage accounts in different regions to address data sovereignty
- Cannot use third party sub-processors because of existing customer agreements
- Want to keep everything in house and under your own control then RMS may meet your needs.
Ravnur charges a monthly subscription for RMS that begins at $499/month. In addition to this monthly subscription fee, there are Azure fixed costs and variable costs. Azure fixed costs are services and resources that run 24/7 such as Azure Front Door, streaming servers and VM disks. Azure variable costs are incurred from usage (e.g. encoding). The total monthly costs therefore are comprised of the Ravnur subscription fee and the Azure fixed and variable costs.
Example 1: The monthly cost of RMS in the idle state (i.e. no usage).
| Ravnur subscription fee | Azure fixed costs | Azure variable costs | Total monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| $499 | $120 | $0 | $619 |
Example 2: The monthly cost of RMS when you upload 5000 minutes of HD video for encoding into ABR sets.
| Ravnur subscription fee | Azure fixed costs | Azure variable costs | Total monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| $499 | $120 | $24.13 | $643.13 |
Azure Media Services has low fixed costs, basically just the streaming server is needed. All other costs are usage-based. The cost of encoding is where AMS recoups its costs and makes its money. AMS encoding is a metered billing service that uses a formula that converts input minutes to output minutes based on multipliers for resolution and codec and then charges a per minute fee based on the calculated output minutes. With RMS, encoding cost is strictly based on server time. If it takes 10 minutes to encode a video, then the cost is 10 minutes of server time. This is generally an order of magnitude cheaper.
Let's compare the encoding cost for a 30 minute 1080p video (H.264/AAC, 30fps). We'll apply the Standard Adaptive Bitrate preset that creates a set of files (2 HD, 3 SD) to AMS and RMS so that both services will produce five 30 minute videos as the adaptive bitrate set.
| Azure Media Services | Ravnur Media Services | Difference |
|---|---|---|
| $3.71 | $0.15 | -94% |
Calculations
RMS. The default VM used by RMS is the D8pds_v5 which costs approximately $0.38 per hour. Testing shows that creating the full adaptive bitrate set requires about 80% of the video's duration. Therefore, the cost is 30min80%$0.38/hr*1hr/60min= $0.152.
AMS. AMS creates two HD files (1080p and 720p) and HD files have a multiplier of 2.25. It also creates 3 SD files (480p, 360p, 240p) that have a multiplier of 1.25. The cost per output minute is $0.015. Therefore, the AMS cost is 2(30min2.25$0.015) + 3(30min1.25$0.015)=$3.7125
Let's look at an all-up comparison of RMS and AMS. As we did in the previous example, we'll look at the costs when uploading 5000 minutes of HD video during the month.
| Service | Subscription fee | Fixed costs | Encoding costs | Total monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Azure Media Services | none | $64.50 | $618.75 | $683.25 |
| Ravnur Media Services | $499 | $120 | $24.13 | $643.13 |
Looking at the total costs we can see that the economic breakpoint is at approximately 4650 input minutes per month, and beyond that amount of video, RMS becomes increasingly attractive.
Streaming and storage costs are essentially the same as with AMS. The streaming server is approximately $75/month, whereas the AMS streaming endpoint is $64.50. The Azure CDN costs do not change. Azure storage costs do not change.