Microsoft says that the deal to launch Cloud TV with China’s PPTV, which it talked about back in August last year, is up and running in China. It claims at a press conference in Shanghai this week that it has built the world’s largest Cloud TV system.
Back in August it was fairly clear that this was what Microsoft was after, a multi country network using its Azure Cloud platform, which would be made ready for the world’s media companies. In effect this is Mediaroom two, the remake, but this time delivered out of the core Microsoft computer facilities.
PPTV is currently the largest online television service operating in China, featuring television shows, sports, entertainment and news content and the first Chinese new media outlet which is cooperating with Microsoft on its cloud platform. The only other major media win for Microsoft’s Azure platform was when it signed up Samsung to deliver content to its TV sets directly, in 120 countries around the world, last July.
Microsoft launched its Azure Platform almost three years ago, and has been looking to land a media major on it anywhere in the world, ever since. It claims that it is a general purpose Cloud infrastructure that can be used for content delivery to mobiles, to the web, and that it has its own identity and data management layer, and can use big data. The Media Services sub-set of Azure allows clients to spin up extra resources, just like the Amazon Elastic Cloud, and switch them off when a job’s done. It offers workflow management as well as encode and transcode services, and ABR outputs in HLS, its own Smooth Streaming and in MPEG DASH. It protects everything with its own PlayReady DRM and has an integrated advertising system to integrate overlays, pre-rolls, mid-rolls and post-rolls into content.
The strategic partnership was signed in July with PPTV to launch PPTV ATN (Asia TV Networks) on Windows Azure for consumption anywhere. PPTV claims that it has over 100 million overseas users and has just expanded into Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Europe and North America.
Everyone is fond of saying they run the first cloud based TV system, and while we know there are plenty of others, in particular TV Everywhere services using technologies from companies like ActiveVideo and Entone, and services such as those from Magine in Europe. But if what you mean by cloud is that it can come to you from spare computer resources anywhere in the world, then perhaps Microsoft is right about this claim.
Microsoft has recently sold its Mediaroom multicast IPTV system to Ericsson, which will merge it with its own multiscreen product lines. And one of the majors that has recently signed up for some of this technology is Telefonica, which has built its Global Video Platform around Mediaroom plus some adaptive Smooth Streaming from Microsoft’s other product lines, with the whole process being managed by Mediaroom’s new owner Ericsson. We wouldn’t be too surprised to find Microsoft Azure popping up in that system at some stage.