Microsoft Azure announces new media capabilities, new partnerships at IBC 2017

Arif Bacchus

Azure Servers

Microsoft is always improving the capabilities in Azure, helping the company’s customers and partners move and monetize or store and protect their media in or to the cloud. To continue this mission, today, Microsoft is announcing several improvements to Azure Media Services, Azure, CDN, and Azure Storage at IBC 2017.

To begin, Azure Media Services picks up Video Indexer capability, bringing a unique integrated bundling of Microsoft’s cloud-based artificial intelligence and cognitive capabilities applied specifically for video content. There is also the addition of HEVC Encoding support, which will assist video service operators in delivering higher resolution and higher quality video to their viewers, while also saving on storage and CDN costs.

Next are some improvements to Azure Storage. These improvements help address the needs of media and entertainment customers. You can find a full list of these changes here, but we’ve highlighted the most important improvements below.

  • Azure Archive Blob Storage – Azure Archive Blob storage is designed to provide Media organizations with a low cost means of delivering durable, highly available, secure cloud storage for rarely accessed data with flexible latency requirements.
  • Higher performance – Azure Blob Storage now supports significantly higher throughput for object reads, up to gigabytes per second for a single object to support post production, transcoding and other workloads.
  • Encryption at rest (including customer managed keys)– Azure Blob Storage has support for Encryption at rest to meet the security needs of our media customers. Azure is the only public cloud compliant with the MPAA certification.

Wrapping it up, Azure CDN picks up some capabilities which will help optimize performance for streaming and dynamic content. Microsoft is adding the ability to optimize the delivery of streaming media and is also adding support for DSA to Azure CDN to help improve the performance of web pages with dynamic content. Lastly, the company is enabling “One Click” for assets in Azure storage, helping simplify and made Azure CDN capability transparent.

Those in attendance at IBS 2017 can learn more about these improvements, Azure Media Services, and Azure Storage by visiting the booth in Hall 15 and meeting the Azure team.