Windows Azure will help power NBC’s coverage of the Sochi Olympics

NBC Sports Group is responsible for you enjoying the Sochi Wintertime Olympics if you're planning on watching here in the United States. NBC Sports is the sports division of the NBC television network. They have rights to broadcast a variety of sporting events and leagues. Most notable of the events are the Olympic Games. Those games are officially starting in nearly xiv hours and on NBC they'll exist partly powered past Microsoft's Azure.

The Olympics are a pretty big deal to NBC. They've had the American rights to broadcast the Summer Olympics since the 1988 games and since 2002 they've had the rights for the Winter Olympics. It was just a few years ago that they agreed to a $4.38 billion contract with the International Olympic Committee to circulate games until 2022.

NBC but recently released their Sports Alive Extra apps for Windows Phone and for Windows 8. Those apps will allow folks in the U.S. to view the games alive, watch content on-need, and much more. Those live and on-demand videos volition exist delivered using Azure.

It was concluding Apr that Microsoft and NBC Sports appear a partnership to use Azure to power NBC's content. The brotherhood betwixt the two officially started this by summer with programming from NBC Sport. Azure is existence primarily used to practise the heavy lifting of encoding the video in the cloud so that content can exist live-streamed and bachelor for on-demand viewing. Here's Erick Black, VP of technologies at NBC Sport, on why they chose Azure:

"The real story for us is calibration and reliability — Azure buys u.s.a. multi-region failover and multiple encoders to handle the volume of these events."

Be sure to thank Azure when you're watching the Sochi games alive on your Surface or catching up with on-need videos using your Windows Phone.

Source: Gigaom, Microsoft

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