Microsoft Announces Media Services Platform For Cloud

Microsoft Corp. has announced new media services and guidance to enable content providers and customers to realise the power of cloud computing.

The new cloud-based Windows Azure Media Services is designed to make creating, managing and delivering media to any device easier than ever by offering a comprehensive set of ready-to-use first and third-party media technologies.

Microsoft also published a new Broadcast Reference Architecture that offers prescriptive guidance on how media companies can architect their solutions to improve systems performance management as they move toward the cloud.

Taking advantage of the worldwide Windows Azure cloud infrastructure, Windows Azure Media Services gives content providers and media partners the nearly unlimited capacity of the cloud to cost-effectively handle a huge volume of digital media and make it available in an accessible format.

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“Our internal research shows that more than one-third of today’s Internet traffic is devoted to video consumption, and we expect that to grow to 80 percent by the end of 2015,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, Windows Azure Application Platform.

“Not everyone has the expertise or capital required to build a media infrastructure, so Windows Azure Media Services enables companies everywhere to build custom media solutions that easily scale and adapt to meet consumers’ needs, wherever or however they consume it,” he added.

Some of the solutions enabled by Windows Azure Media Services include high-speed transfers from Aspera Inc., content encoding from Digital Rapids Corp., ATEME and Dolby Laboratories Inc., content security from BuyDRM and Civolution, and video-on-demand streaming from Wowza Media Systems Inc. In addition, Windows Azure Media Services enables full-service media companies such as iStreamPlanet Co. and Movideo Pty. Ltd. to host and offer complete workflow solutions to customers.

Windows Azure Media Services will also support an entire ecosystem of connected devices. With support for Microsoft Smooth Streaming, HTTP Live Streaming and Flash media formats, Windows Azure Media Services will enable customers to reach almost any connected device, from Xbox 360, Windows Phone and Windows-based PCs to non-Microsoft platforms such as smart TVs, set-top boxes, MacOS, iOS and Android.

To further enable true interoperability between media technologies from different vendors, Windows Azure Media Services will also include native support for MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP), the International Organisation for Standardisation and Interoperability Executive Customer Council standards developed by Microsoft and other industry players.