Windows Azure Media Service realizes the value of London Olympic cloud transmission

The London Olympics is a grand event that puts 302 gold medals in a reasonable squeeze in 19 days. Multiple rounds of preliminaries or rounds often occur simultaneously, in 32 kinds of sports, the challenge for the content providers is to deliver the games to audiences around the world, allowing them to freely choose the items, times, and methods they like to see, whether it's live, interrupt, or look back, or follow their own needs after the project is over. The popularity of smartphones and tablets has led to an increase in the demand for unlimited time, unlimited location, and unlimited equipment. Gartner said the world sold 60 million Tablet PCs in 2011 and is expected to reach 118.9 million units in 2012 years, to 369.2 million by 2016. Now the US estimates that more than 113 million people have smartphones, just last year, 38%– the number of mobile device holders in the London Olympics soared 55% from the Beijing Olympics four years ago, according to NBC data. Any time, any place, any equipment will be the future of information creation and destruction of the direction of development, not only for the Olympic Games, but for ordinary video content.

The implementation of two key technologies to help media providers and broadcasters provide flexible solutions, and two key technologies are cloud computing and media workflow tools. Event broadcasters for the Olympic Games should do the following:

1. Buy or rent the required network system, computer and storage hardware.

2. Deploy it.

3. Payment of electricity, air-conditioning and operation of the monitoring personnel and technical support staff round-the-clock service.

4. Integrate all together to meet the workflow requirements of any equipment environment anytime, anywhere, including:

A． Manually install several different types of server resources: collection, production, caching and so on.

b． Manually configure and connect to the server to create a channel. For large events, you need to configure multiple servers and connect those servers together to create a single logical channel.

5. Establish all components in a redundant and flexible manner.

April in the National Broadcasting Association (NAB) we announced a preview of Windows Azure Media Services to provide our partners and broadcasters with models to meet any arbitrary device requirements anytime, anywhere. For the London Olympics, we and Akamai,deltatre,southworks partnered with an uninterrupted digital media stream to create the first fully cloud-based transport model. We can support many devices, including flash,silverlight,xbox,ios,android and Windows Phone. We provide tools, including live live video on-demand creation, real-time highlight editing, and the ability to easily install and manage the Synchronized content channel, can easily meet the needs of the global audience. Windows Azure Media Services and our partners support Télévisions (France), RTVE (Spain), CTV (Canada) and Terra (Central and South America), with 500 million of potential audiences covering three continents and 30 countries. At any one time we have enabled 35 Full HD live channels and 140 high-capacity channels worldwide.

With Windows Azure Media Services, our partners and broadcasters can access Microsoft's Global data center. They buy what they want when they need it. They can expand requirements based on peak traffic or demand. They eliminate redundancy and failure. They also get a simple, flexible, agile environment to handle their workflow requirements: include, make, cache, transcoding, highlight-Edit live video, live broadcast to video-on-demand and channel management. This allows them to provide services anytime, anywhere, with the content of any device requirements.

"Provides audio-visual content for cross-platform devices and manages a large number of user requests that should be handled quickly and efficiently in large events such as the Olympics." We have great confidence in Windows Azure. It shows us that this is a right decision to address these challenges and to provide the current content of consumer demand. "–francisco Jose Asensi Viana, head of business development at RTVE (Spain).

We are delighted that Windows Azure Media Services are available to media partners and broadcasters and we look forward to the end of the year for the public.