Microsoft: View from the Top 2013
“Any Media on Any Device, Anywhere” has been the ultimate goal for content companies and service providers as they try to reach consumers where they are. Given the proliferation of connected devices, delivery formats and content protection schemes, attaining that goal with reliability, scale and cost effectiveness is easier said than done.
Microsoft, with its long history developing media platforms and services, has embraced that challenge and launched Windows Azure Media Services, which marries its media expertise with cloud services. Today we are helping customers like NBC Sports, Xbox and European Tour Golf achieve that vision by bringing an ecosystem of partners to our cloud services platform and making it seamless for customers to use.
Windows Azure Media Services strives towards the goal of media ubiquity by bringing three key pillars together:
Curated and Ready to Use Media Services
• The common challenges of content ingestion, transcoding, content protection and streaming are all integrated into a seamless workflow and exposed through simple REST APIs.
• Services are both format and DRM agnostic and support all popular streaming formats and standards like MPEG-DASH and Common Encryption.
• Seamless ad integration and identity services enable multiple monetization models.
• CDN integration across multiple providers including the Windows Azure CDN comes out of the box.
• Players and SDKs across all popular client platforms are provided and are open sourced for further customization.
Cloud Scale with Cost Efficiencies
• Windows Azure Media Services are built on the same cloud that Xbox Live services and Office 365 run and brings the reliability and scalability of Microsoft’s cloud datacenters to media workflows.
• Windows Azure is the fastest growing public cloud platform with over a dozen Internet scale datacenters available worldwide today, and more coming.
Access to Partners
• Windows Azure Media Services brings together a large set of partners onto the cloud services platform to offer media customers a feature rich, end-to-end workflow.
• Customers can choose either first party or partner services to assemble an end-to-end workflow that meets their needs. Learn more about using Windows Azure Media Services and sign up for a free trial at www.windowsazure.com/media.
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