Introduction by Vishwas Lele:

We released the first version of our Media Center App for SharePoint 2013 almost eighteen months ago. In building this app we wanted to bring the functionality of Azure Media Services– support for complete media lifecycles, from ingestion to streaming— to SharePoint. You can read a detailed summary of the design decisions that went into building the first version here. In a nutshell, our goal was to build a SharePoint hosted app, working both in the cloud and on-premise, which provides seamless access to the media assets hosted in Azure Media Services. Furthermore, the access is enabled via a SharePoint construct such as the asset library. This setup allows the users to leverage search, custom views, and a built-in player – all the SharePoint functionality that they are already familiar with. However, as you may have guessed, the asset library only holds the metadata about the assets: the assets themselves are streamed from the AMS origination servers. Read More…