REDMOND , Wash. — Sept . 10, 2014 — Wednesday, before the opening day of the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC), Microsoft Corp. announced new cloud-first media services, including HD-quality live streaming that supports today’s most popular devices and platforms, end-to-end content protection capabilities, and a new service that simplifies the indexing of audio and video content and makes it easier to search. These new capabilities are part of Microsoft Azure Media Services, a comprehensive platform built on a market-proven public cloud that media companies can use to build scalable, cost-effective and end-to-end media solutions.

“Broadcasters and premium content owners spend significant amounts of money and resources each year to host, manage, support and distribute their media,” said Sudheer Sirivara, partner director of Engineering, Azure Media Services, Microsoft. “Now with Azure Media Services, customers can move that infrastructure to the cloud — with support for live and on-demand content — and focus on what really matters to their business and customers: creating, monetizing and distributing content to more customers on more devices.”

New partner solutions

Since Azure Media Services was initially released in 2012, a broad ecosystem of industry partners have built integrated solutions that offer customers flexibility and choice for their media workflows. Microsoft is now adding four new partners to that ecosystem:

• Telestream’s Wirecast offers customers a built-in destination that makes it quick and easy to send content from Wirecast’s live streaming production software to Microsoft Azure.
  

• NewTek TriCaster offers customers a total media publishing solution for live productions of any scale and includes the ability to ingest mezzanine stream over Real-Time Messaging Protocol.
  

• Cires21 offers customers a simple and easy-to-use service to help monitor the health of live channels.
  

• JW Player offers customers the ability to customize and distribute premium adaptive content to a wide array of devices.
  

Additional information

More information on the new cloud services and partnerships announced today is available at the Microsoft Azure blog and the Microsoft booths at the IBC in Hall 13, booths MS1 and MS2.

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

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