Microsoft has announced a new service in their Windows Azure cloud services to allow media publishers to store, distribute, encode, convert, and manage media content. The new service dubbed Windows Azure Media Services supports distribution and streaming of multiple media formats to a vast number of clients including those not running Windows.

You can use Windows Azure Media Services to deliver solutions to any device or client – including HTML5, Silverlight, Flash, Windows 8, iPads, iPhones, Android, Xbox, and Windows Phone devices.  Windows Azure Media Services supports a wide variety of streaming formats – including Smooth Streaming, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), and Flash Media Streaming.  — Scott Guthrie’s Blog

The Windows Azure Media services will include REST based APIs including OData 3.0 access as well as a .NET SDK that will be released possibly open source with an Apache 2.0 license.

ISVs can programmatically connect to Media Services by using Open Data Protocol (OData) 3.0 to call the REST API layer directly, or by using the Media Services SDK for .NET (the SDK simplifies the process of making calls to the REST API layer). OData is installed with WCF Data Services 5.0 for OData v3. After the Media Services 1.0 RTM release, the Media Services SDK will be available on GitHub with an Apache 2.0 license, and additional languages will be supported.  — Windows Azure Media Services Preview for Developers

With demos going on this week at the NAB 2012 conference there’s sure to be some video demos online soon and if you want to be one of the first into the fray, email mediaservices@microsoft.com (along with details of the scenario you’d like to use it for).