Azure Media Services: Is it possible to share a single streaming locator between multiple accounts?

Question

I want to create multiple Media Services accounts but use a single streaming locator for the time being. The reason for that is to avoid incurring a large bill due to multiple locators. I have noticed that a single MS account can have multiple locators, but I'm not so sure if a single locator can be shared between multiple accounts. Is this possible?

Answer 1

You do you mean exactly by a large bill due to multiple locators?

Streaming is billed based on a number of factors. There is first the Streaming Endpoint that you are using, Standard or Premium. For large audiences that are going through a CDN, we recommend Premium. For smaller audiences and when the egress bandwidth is below 600 Mbps max (you can monitor it using the Azure Monitor metrics,) you can be fine with just the Standard endpoint. That has a monthly fixed cost for Standard, and a per-unit (per 200Mbps or egress) cost for Premium.

After that cost, the additional costs are based on egress data. Having one, two, or 300 locators only impacts cost if they are egressing data from the Streaming Endpoint.

I would recommend sticking to a single AMS account for the time being until you are ready to scale out to handle more cross-regional failover or HA scenarios, or you need to segregate customers/tenants by accounts for any reasons.