Azure Media Services provides a high performance, cloud scalable video encoding, indexing and streaming platform for video producers. It provides the ability for video producers to encode their video so that it is optimized and available for a wide variety of formats such as tablets, mobile phones, television stations, etc.
Azure Media Services was used to broadcast all of NBC’s Olympics feeds online which is a pretty good scalability test given the audience for live event feeds.
Microsoft has announced the availability of a new speech recognition service that indexes and stores as searchable metadata all the speech found in the video. The indexed text can then be used for close captioning, transcriptions and searching.
The engine behind the indexing service is called MAVIS and has been in development for several years.
Note that at this time MAVIS only supports indexing of English content.