REDMOND, Wash. — April 17, 2012 — The countdown has begun for the landmark entertainment event millions of fans worldwide have been anticipating for more than four years. “Halo 4,” the hotly anticipated sequel to the iconic franchise that has shaped entertainment history, will launch worldwide on Nov. 6, 2012.

“Halo 4” marks the return of legendary hero Master Chief, named by Fast Company as “one of the most popular characters in gaming history,”1 and aims to set a new standard for blockbuster interactive entertainment with the launch. Set four years after the events in “Halo 3,” Master Chief returns to confront his destiny and face an ancient evil that threatens the fate of the entire universe. Developed by 343 Industries, “Halo 4” marks a new beginning for the landmark entertainment franchise that has sold more than 40 million games worldwide and inspired multiple New York Times best-selling novels, live-action shorts, comic books, action figures and apparel.

“We are beginning a new saga with ‘Halo 4’ and embarking on a journey that will encompass the next decade of ‘Halo’ games and experiences,” said Phil Spencer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Studios. “Millions of fans worldwide have been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to step back into the boots of Master Chief, and, with ‘Halo 4’ leading the charge, we’re confident 2012 will be the most successful year in Xbox history.”

“Halo 3,” the biggest consumer product launch of all time when it released in 2007,2 concluded the original game trilogy, but left many unanswered questions around the fates of the series’ beloved hero, the Master Chief, and his artificial intelligence companion, Cortana. On Nov. 6, fans will experience the next chapter of the iconic franchise.

Tonight, Conan O’Brien will help celebrate this fall’s launch of “Halo 4” with a special segment on “CONAN” on TBS at 11 p.m. PDT/10 p.m. CDT. Those interested should tune in and check out http://www.teamcoco.com or follow @TeamCoco on Twitter for updates and more details.

About 343 Industries

343 Industries is the publisher and developer of the blockbuster “Halo” series of videogames and, as part of Microsoft Studios, oversees the “Halo” franchise, including novels, comics, licensed collectibles, apparel and more. 343 Industries is home to world-class developers working on the “Halo” “Reclaimer Saga,” which commences with the arrival of “Halo 4” on Nov. 7, 2012, exclusively on Xbox 360. The studio has been shaping the creative direction of the franchise since “Halo 3: ODST” in 2009.

About Xbox 360

Xbox 360 is a premier home entertainment and video game system. Thanks to the addition of Kinect, Xbox 360 will forever transform social gaming and entertainment with a whole new way to play — no controller required. Xbox 360 is also home to the best and broadest games as well as one of the world’s largest on-demand libraries of music, standard- and high-definition movies, TV shows and digital games, all in one place. The entertainment center of the living room, Xbox 360 blends unbeatable content with a leading social entertainment network of 40 million Xbox LIVE members to create a limitless entertainment experience that can be shared at home or across the globe. More information about Xbox 360 can be found online at http://www.xbox.com.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

1 Source: Fast Company: Why It Feels Good To Get Inside Master Chief's Helmet 2 “Halo 3” generated $170 million in 24 hours in the U.S., surpassing the $125 million day-one record set by “Halo 2” (2004). Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

LAS VEGAS — April 17, 2012 — Today at the sold-out Microsoft Management Summit, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson spoke to nearly 5,000 IT professionals about their opportunity to deliver fast, reliable services with cloud computing. His keynote speech highlighted how customers around the world are already using Microsoft System Center 2012, available today for evaluation and purchase, to create private clouds. Anderson also discussed how IT professionals can evolve their roles with cloud computing to help their businesses be more competitive.

“Cloud computing gives IT professionals an opportunity to increase their strategic value to their businesses while building new skills,” Anderson said. “Microsoft’s private cloud solutions help IT professionals become cloud innovators for their companies, managing and delivering the applications people need to be productive across private, hybrid and public clouds.”

In addition, Anderson provided a preview of how Microsoft’s private cloud will become even more powerful with Windows Server “8” and announced that the operating system will officially be named Windows Server 2012. The new “cloud-optimized OS” is due out later this year.

Management Makes the Difference for Customers

IT organizations that use System Center 2012 and Windows Server with Hyper-V for cloud computing are helping their companies move faster, save money and compete better. For example, EmpireCLS Worldwide Chauffeured Services, a luxury car service headquartered in New Jersey, has used a Microsoft private cloud to reduce datacenter costs by 50 percent amid 30 percent company growth during the past 18 months. With more than 1,000 employees, EmpireCLS relies on the Microsoft private cloud to deliver a reliable reservation system to customers in more than 700 cities around the world. Using System Center 2012, EmpireCLS also used its cloud environment to create a new business with its BeTransported software as a service offering. The application is now in use broadly within the car service industry.

Similarly, The Walsh Group, a construction firm based in Chicago, switched to a Microsoft private cloud to automate delivery of virtualized servers and applications for 5,000 employees. In addition to business efficiencies, the company has been able to reduce hardware and energy costs by 20 percent.

“With Microsoft, we are moving beyond virtualization to cloud computing, so we can automate and manage our IT environment as a whole,” said Patrick Wirtz, manager of Technology Innovation at The Walsh Group. “It’s all about giving our engineers, tradespeople and software developers the computing resources they need to build roadways, bridges and high-rises.”

In another case, Apartments.com, a national online apartment search service in Chicago, needed a more dynamic and responsive IT infrastructure to stay competitive in the market and deliver faster service to its 6 million site visitors each month. With Microsoft’s private cloud, the company realized 50 percent faster server provisioning for new services and 75 percent lower licensing costs.

More From MMS 2012

Anderson published a blog post today that further details the opportunities for IT professionals to accelerate their careers in the era of continuous services and connected devices. Tomorrow, April 18, he will again take the stage at MMS and address the “World of Connected Devices.” The keynote broadcast will start at 8:30 a.m. PDT.

More information about System Center 2012 and Microsoft private cloud is available here, including the live and on-demand keynote broadcasts, links to evaluation software, and more. The STB News Bytes blog has further details on the news discussed at the event. The conversation on Twitter can be followed at #MMS2012.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

LAS VEGAS — April 16, 2012 — At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2012 conference today, Microsoft Corp. announced new media services and guidance to enable content providers and customers to realize 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.

Windows Azure Media Services

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 the format that customers want, when they want it. Windows Azure Media Services’ ready-to-use services allow customers to simplify the creation of complex media workflows built on Microsoft Media Platform and third-party technologies.

“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.”

Highlighting the diversity of solutions enabled by Windows Azure Media Services is a broad ecosystem of media partners, with many already integrating their technologies for customers to use in their own media solutions. These 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 from some of the largest consumer electronics and manufacturers in the world. 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 Organization for Standardization and Interoperability Executive Customer Council standards developed by Microsoft and other industry leaders that deliver an exceptional video experience for end users by automatically adapting to varying client and network conditions during playback.

To further showcase the capabilities of Windows Azure Media Services, Microsoft is working with Akamai and deltatre to deliver high-definition streaming video of the London 2012 Olympic Games across multiple countries through major rights holders in Europe, North America, Central America and South America. This will be the first time an event of this scale will be hosted and broadcast from a cloud platform to millions of viewers around the globe.

“Consumers now watch video anywhere, anytime and on any device,” said Bill Wheaton, senior vice president and general manager of Media at Akamai. “Working with partners such as Microsoft and deltatre, we’re eager for the Olympic Games to start and for the powerful combination of Windows Azure Media Services and Akamai’s SOLA Media Solutions to deliver a high-quality viewing experience on a global scale.” Customers can visit http://www.windowsazure.com/media to sign up for the preview of Windows Azure Media Services.

Broadcast Reference Architecture

Microsoft’s goal is to provide media and cable companies with the necessary tools and guidance to make decisions and deliver technologies that enable powerful business transformation. The Broadcast Reference Architecture provides the way forward for media organizations to assess current technology, resources and processes; to lay the foundation for future success; and to provide flexibility to allow businesses to grow, adapt and innovate quickly and in a cost-efficient manner.

Microsoft published the Broadcast Reference Architecture for the first time today and has worked with several partners, including Harris Corp., Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. and Decentrix Inc., to roll out this reference architecture. The Broadcast Reference Architecture white paper is available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/telecom/docs/BroadcastReferenceArchitecture.pdf. More information about Microsoft’s products and services for media and cable companies is available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/presskits/telecom/media.aspx.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.