Windows Azure Media Services Provides NBC Streaming for 2014 Sochi Winter Games

Microsoft's Windows Azure Media Services is being used to publish and stream all 98 events of the 2014 Sochi Winter Games for NBC Olympics in the United States.

The project is expected to include over 50 live high-definition streams  and over 1,000 hours of on-demand streaming coverage for millions of viewers with different devices and operating systems. Viewers will be able to access live and on-demand content via the NBC Sports Live Extra app available free on Windows 8 and Windows RT devices, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS.

To meet those demands, Windows Azure will be “leading the way by providing end-to-end live streaming of the Winter Olympics entirely in the cloud, including encoding, transcoding and streaming, for the first time in history,” said Scott Guthrie, acting lead of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, in a press release announcing the partnership with NBC.

Microsoft noted that it is working with Adobe's Primetime TV publishing and monetization platform, including Adobe Primetime Player SDKs for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS and other platforms, to ensure full scalability and monetization of video streams across millions of U.S. households. In addition, Microsoft is working with iStreamPlanet and its cloud-based, live video workflow solution Aventus to power live video ingest and multiple bit rate encoding, including ad insertion, for NBC’s streaming coverage of the Olympic Games.

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