I’m pleased to announce that Windows Azure Media Encoding, Encoding Reserved Unit, and On-Demand Streaming Reserved Unit are now generally available with the support of service level agreements.

Media Encoding will remain free of charge until February 18, 2013, when it will be billed based on data processed on a graduated scale starting at $1.99 per gigabyte for the first terabyte per month. The total gigabytes processed are equal to the data input to the encoder plus the data output from the encoder, calculated for a billing month. Both input and output data will be stored in the Media Services customer’s storage account, for which the standard Windows Azure storage and data transfer charges will apply.

Additionally, you can take advantage of improved on-demand streaming throughput with the new Windows Azure Media On-Demand Streaming Reserved Unit. The On-Demand Streaming Reserved Unit provides dedicated egress capacity that can be purchased in increments of 200 megabits per second . On-Demand Streaming Reserved Units will be offered free of charge until February 1, 2013, when they will be billed at the per-unit rate of $199.00 per month, calculated on a daily basis using the highest number of reserved units that are provisioned in the account in the corresponding 24-hour period. The original On-Demand Streaming service, which makes use of a shared compute environment without a service level agreement, will continue at no additional charge.

For more information, please refer to the Media section of our Pricing Details webpage.

As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft announcements, updates, and links: @clinted