Announcing Windows Azure Media Services

I am excited to finally be able to discuss what I have been working on this past year and explain why I have been so quiet on my blog for the most part.  I haven’t been able to discuss my project publicly for a long time outside of NDA conversations with partners and customers so this post is going to be a lot of fun for me.

About a year ago at NAB 2011, we began to discuss with customers and partners the idea of a set of platform level services in the cloud to enable the easy, flexible, and highly scalable delivery of media. The set of services that we envisioned would enable customers big and small to move their media production and streaming delivery workflows easily and securely from on-premises to a public cloud infrastructure. 

To that end, our team began to focus on the architecture and design of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering on Windows Azure that would take the best components of the Microsoft Media Platform, including IIS Media Services, Expression Encoder, PlayReady, IIS Transform Manager, Audience Insight, Rough Cut Editor, our player and client frameworks for PC, Mac, Windows Phone, iOS, and Xbox, and combine them into a set of easy to use services sitting behind a RESTful API.

Last week at the National Association of Broadcaster’s convention, we finally announced Windows Azure Media Services.  This new collection of services coming soon to Windows Azure  simplifies the creation, management, and delivery of media to almost any device including Microsoft Xbox, Windows Phone handsets and Windows PCs, as well as non-Microsoft platforms such as smart TVs, set-top boxes, MacOS, iOS, and Android.  Content providers and media partners can take advantage of the cost benefits and cloud capacity found with Windows Azure, and provide customers massive amounts of digital media in the variety of formats they require, when they require it. Windows Azure Media Services’ ready-to-use services allow customers to simplify the creation of complex media workflows built on the Microsoft Media Platform and third-party technologies.

To learn more about Windows Azure Media Services and sign-up for the upcoming Preview, please click here.  We will be accepting sign ups for the next few weeks and will alert you as soon as the services are live for use.

For additional details on the announcement, please check out Scott Guthrie’s Blog (announce details, media partners, capabilities, architecture overviews, scenarios)

Or for press release information and partner information, head on over to the  Microsoft Cloud Virtual Press Room.

I’ll follow up with a number of blog posts as we get closer to Preview release.  After the Preview is live, I’ll be adding a set of technical posts and hot-to articles.