Microsoft sharpens Azure media tools ahead of Olympics Microsoft has announced the "preview" of Windows Azure Media Services, a set of tools to let media companies host, stream and encode content. Redmond used the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2012 conference in Las Vegas to unwrap the service package, which includes both hosting services within the Azure cloud and …
"Any system, including those using HTML5, Silverlight, Flash, Windows 8, iPads, iPhones, Android, Xbox, and Windows Phone devices"
Odd, why do they break out Windows 8 (and not Windows 7 or earlier) and iPads/iPhones seperately?.
Wouldn't saying that it streams to any HTML5 enabled decice (with/without DRM) cover it? Seems like everything else listed is more or less a subset of devices that can take a HTML5 stream.
Of course in previous Olympics, Silverlight was promoted heavily as the (only?) way to stream content by MS.. that didn't seem to achieve a lot as it looks like HTML5 has won the war over SL and Flash as being the preferred method for video streaming.
to take the last point... HTML5 has not won the war over SL/Flash re video streaming. What does HTML5 support in the <video> tag today? Nothing apart from progressive download on-demand, non-adaptive, unprotected content.
on iOS devices Apple have "extended" the <video> tag to add support for the (proprietary) HLS but that doesn't help the millions of other browsers out there.
From reading the release Azure Media Services supports streaming to multiple different formats concurrently - hence the ability to support Android devices (multiple bitrates to come with the fragmented platform); iOS devices (again catering for small iPhones to iPad3 retina devices); Windows Phone; Xbox and PS3 consoles; Silverlight (for traditional Windows and OSX desktops) as well as directly supporting the adaptive streaming solutions for Win8 ... and it will support MPEG-DASH for the future
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