Launched some months ago in the preview mode, Windows Azure Media Services has now been made available publicly. Many of its core components has been improved significantly! Keeping in mind, it is important for any service or offering to integrate and adapt to mobile devices and the applications that run on them Windows Azure Media Services has been made extremely scalable for streaming on-demand video to consumers on any device.
The fully developed service now allows to stream video to a wide variety of hardware such as iPad, iPhone, Xbox, Windows Phones and platforms such as Windows 8 and Android. In a move to secure an advantage and drive more adoption of the service, Microsoft is offering a 90 day demo period too.
Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie, in his blog post comes clear over what Windows Azure Media Service users can expect from this new service. He mentions there that the service has already become very popular and been used by many international broadcasters for streaming video.
He says,
With today’s release, you now have everything you need to quickly build great, extremely scalable, end-to-end media solutions for streaming on-demand video to consumers on any device. For example, you can easily build a media service for delivering training videos to employees in your company, stream video content for your web-site, or build a premium video-on-demand service like Hulu or Netflix. Last year several broadcasters used Windows Azure Media Services to stream the London 2012 Olympics.
Now that on-demand streaming is enabled, it is believed Microsoft’s next focus will be on enabling live streaming as well.
