NBC Olympics chooses Azure for Summer Games streaming

Microsoft has just announced that NBC Olympics has chosen Microsoft Azure as the trusted cloud provider to power the network’s Olympic streaming coverage. This represents the second time that NBC Olympics has chosen Azure for streaming coverage, and Microsoft will also be working with Adobe Primetime and its Primetime TV publishing and monetization platform to bring a authenticated streaming coverage live and on-demand to Olympic fans.

Overall, Microsoft Azure will provide cloud encoding and hosting with video workflows for NBC Olympics’ production and NBCUniversal and NBCOlympics.com’s record 4,500 hours of online content. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft, put the situation best:

“We always strive to deliver more content in real time to more channels and devices around the world…During the Sochi Olympic Games, NBC Olympics had more than 1 million concurrent live viewers watching a collective average of 600,000 hours of coverage per day. We are planning for even greater viewing numbers for Rio, and are excited to power the experience again using Microsoft Azure.”

Rick Cordella, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, NBC Sports Group, also expressed confidence in the reliability of Azure. He said:

“The Rio Olympics have nearly three times as many events per day as the Sochi Games…With the Azure cloud platform, Microsoft is partnering with us to deliver the secure, scalable cloud we depend on to bring the Games to millions of viewers on whichever device they prefer, via end-to-end live streaming entirely in the cloud.”

With the start of the Rio games on Friday, there will be many ways to keep up with the Olympic Action. Bing will provide a schedule that offers daily updated Events to Watch. Outlook also debuted new Interesting Outlook calendar functionality in Outlook.com and Outlook on the web for events starting with the Summer Games, enabling viewers to add their favorite events from the Olympics calendar to their schedule. Lastly, with the NBCSports App, and the freshly updated MSN Sports app, fans will have around-the-clock Olympics coverage.