I'm interested in sharing videos without using an ad-driven service. Azure is a simple and affordable option. Here is both how I did it and how much it is going to cost me.

How To: Upload and Publish an MP4

Upload an 8 MB MP4 video so it is public on the web.

1. Open the Azure Management Portal .
2. Create a new Media Services account.
3. Once it's done, open the new Media Services account.
4. Then click CONTENT > UPLOAD CONTENT.
5. Upload an 8 MB MP4 file from your local machine.
6. Once uploaded, select the video and click publish.
7. Copy and navigate to the publish URL .

Here it is in an HTML5 video tag.

How Much $

How much does it cost to upload an existing MP4 and publishing it to the web? Azure offers a bunch of services related to media services. I only need two:

• Storage
• Data Transfer

For the following examples, I'm transferring a 30 second, high definition video that's 8 MB.

It would cost me less than a penny per month if nobody watched my video and just $1.00 if it received 1300 views.

Storage Costs

Block blobs (binary large objects) can store videos. I use a locally redundant blob for now. This costs $0.0254 per GB for the first TB. That's a lot of 30 second videos.

($0.0254 / 1 GB) * (1 GB / 1024 MB) = ($0.0000248046875 / 1 MB) 
($0.0000248046875 / MB) * (8 MB) = ($0.0001984375 / 8 GB)

It's far less than a penny per 8 GB video. A little more math shows that it costs $1.00 / month to store 5039 similar videos.

Data Transfer Costs

They only get you on the way out. That is, uploading a video to Azure is free but it costs money if someone wants to watch it. Outbound data transfers are free for the first 5 GB / month. After that is costs $0.0918 / GB or less.

($0.0918 / 1 GB) * (1 GB / 1024 MB) = ($0.0000896484375 / 1 MB)
($0.0000896484375 / MB) * (8 MB) = ($0.0007171875 / 8 GB)

That costs far less than a penny per viewing of an 8 GB video. A little more math shows that it would cost $1.00 for 1394 views.

The standard Content Delivery Network (CDN) pricing is similar.

Unnecessary Costs

The rest are unnecessary costs for my simple purposes.

VOD Encoding & Processing

• Video on Demand (VOD) Encoding allows us to convert a video from one format to another (e.g. AVI to MP4). Unnecessary. We can upload and serve MP4s.

• Video on Demand (VOD) Encoding Reserved Units are an opt-in way to provide dedicated resources for our encoding / indexing tasks. Unnecessary.

• Video on Demand (VOD) Indexing lets us make our video content available for search. Unnecessary.

Streaming

• Streaming Units are an opt-in way to provide dedicated, guaranteed resources for our on-demand or live videos. Unnecessary. We can stream without dedicated resources.

• Live Channels let us do live video. Unnecessary.

Content Protection

• PlayReady provides digital rights management. Unnecessary.

• Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Keys provides encryption. Unnecessary.

Conclusion

Using Azure Media Services is a reasonably priced and easy way to share video. The main concern will be preventing a malicious user from making thousands of requests a month, thereby costing me data transfer fees.

I'm going to experiment with the one video for now