MediaKind Sets Enhanced Strategic Partnership With Microsoft To Accelerate Video Digital Transformation

MediaKind today announces an extension to its strategic partnership with Microsoft Corp. to enable new opportunities for video content owners, broadcasters, operators, and enterprises to accelerate their video digital transformation.

This new collaboration has been designed to significantly enhance the integration and optimization of both companies’ products, platforms and cloud capabilities, to enable its respective customers in media and entertainment — and beyond — to drive new levels of growth within the media industry. It will enable MediaKind to go to market, collaborate on innovative and more sustainable opportunities, and deliver a more competitive pricing model for MediaKind customers.

Allen Broome, MediaKind CEO, said: “MediaKind is fully committed to providing a more flexible approach to developing and delivering our cloud-native portfolio across any public or private cloud deployment. We are laser-focused on the needs of cloud-native streaming, and by expanding our long-term relationship with Microsoft, we are demonstrating how we are tackling the core cloud migration challenges in today’s media and entertainment space. Through this collaboration, we are simplifying the process for our customers to integrate and optimize their workflows with Microsoft Azure products and platforms and accelerating our vision to realize a world where all live video can be delivered without any limitations.”

Francesco Venturini, Microsoft corporate vice president of worldwide media & communications industry said: “We’re pleased to play a leading role in driving the transformation of media and entertainment through our partnership with MediaKind. Together, we combine their end to end solutions with the secure Microsoft Azure platform to deliver the high-quality content global audiences expect. From elevating distribution and acquisition infrastructures to transforming workflow capabilities and delivering a more sustainable future, we look forward to empowering our customers to focus on what matters, delivering compelling media experiences. All without having to manage the complexity of building and operating broadcast-grade video processing infrastructure.”

The announcement sees the two leading technology platforms come together to collaborate on a range of new next-generation experiences, which will help drive innovation throughout both companies’ operations.

The respective engineering and product teams will work together to deliver best-in-class cloud video solutions which provide customers with more cost-effective and monetizable opportunities to deliver new live video streaming services at scale. In the future, this cloud-driven model will enable MediaKind customers to access data faster and leverage cutting-edge innovations in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Last year MediaKind was named as a finalist at the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards in both the ‘Media and Communications’ and ‘Global Independent Software Vendor’ categories. This was in recognition of MediaKind’s work with Microsoft to develop an innovative video streaming platform blueprint that powered several live virtual events, including the 2020 Chattanooga Film Festival and the first all-digital Consumer Electronics Show in January 2021. MediaKind’s media-optimized cloud-based MediaFirst TV Platform, hosted in Microsoft Azure, offered the necessary elasticity to scale the encoding of live and on-demand video content up and down as required during both events.