Microsoft Announces New Support for Silverlight by Content Companies Worldwide

Today at the NAB Show 2008, Microsoft Corp. announced significant momentum for Microsoft Silverlight resulting from new customers adopting Silverlight to deliver richer, more interactive media experiences on the Web. Building on recent support from major content providers such as AOL and NBC Olympics.com on MSN, Microsoft announced new adoption of Silverlight by media and content companies worldwide, including Madison Square Garden (MSG) Interactive, Tencent, Abertis Telecom, Terra Networks Operations, SBSi, MNet and Yahoo! JAPAN.

“It’s exciting to see broad industry recognition and rapid adoption of Silverlight across the world,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft. “Silverlight offers customers and partners the highest quality creation and delivery of media, protected content, advertising and rich Internet applications, and we are committed to making it easy for partners to integrate and extend Silverlight capabilities.”

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Microsoft Extends Its Vision for Creating, Managing and Experiencing Content at the NAB Show 2008

This week at the NAB Show 2008, Microsoft Corp. is showcasing its offerings that support the entire content life cycle — from content creation and management to delivering end-user experiences — highlighting the technologies and solutions that media and entertainment companies need to align business and content creation processes.

Microsoft made several announcements at the show, including solution updates to Microsoft Interactive Media Manager (IMM) and Virtual Earth, updates to and new customer deployments of Microsoft Silverlight, a new collaboration between Microsoft Mediaroom and Sigma Designs Inc., new customers implementing Microsoft Dynamics to manage customer relationships as well as their supply chains, and a strategic alliance with Ascent Media Group.

“It’s great to see the debate in the industry shift from whether media companies can create profitable businesses in the digital age to how technology can be used and deployed to manage business processes and fully monetize content across multiple distribution channels,” said Gabriele Di Piazza, managing director for the Media and Entertainment Business in the Communications Sector at Microsoft. “The media industry can expect Microsoft to continually develop and deliver the solutions that tackle the unique challenges unfolding as digital media and the Internet take on greater importance in nearly all facets of life.”

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Microsoft, Ascent Form Strategic Alliance to Build New Solutions to Serve Entertainment Industry Transition to Digital Supply Chain

This week at the NAB Show 2008, Microsoft Corp. and Ascent Media Group announced a new strategic alliance that will result in new solutions that will automate and streamline the supply chain for the media and entertainment industry and help them transition the digital age.

As part of the alliance, Microsoft will work with partners to create a new solution that Ascent Media Group will use to manage its business processes as well as offer new services to media and entertainment companies. Composed of new media and entertainment functionality built on the Microsoft Dynamics AX platform, the new solution will integrate and streamline media production processes. Ascent will offer a hosted version of this solution along with integrated managed services to film studios, broadcasters, global media enterprises and advertising agencies, all of which are demanding capabilities that allow the immediate distribution of digital content to outlets around the world.

The new Microsoft Dynamics AX functions are tailored to address typical business processes in media and entertainment organizations including work order management, library management, resource scheduling, element tracking, digital ordering and distribution, among others. Ascent Media Group is uniquely positioned to be the preferred digital supply chain provider for Microsoft solutions for media companies, with its expertise in asset management, metadata tracking, billing and notifications and strong media industry relationships.

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Microsoft Helps Media and Entertainment Companies Move Into the Digital Distribution Age

This week at the NAB Show 2008, Microsoft Corp. is showcasing several innovative deployments of Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics CRM that help enable media and entertainment companies to streamline and automate manually intensive processes in the digital supply chain. These deployments span the film, broadcast and music industries, all of which share common challenges arising from the explosion of digital media. Microsoft Dynamics is a line of financial, customer relationship and supply chain management solutions that help businesses work more effectively.

“The need for integrated business systems is more critical than ever as the media and entertainment industry transitions from distributing content through single channels to repurposing and delivering content for multiple user experiences,” said Gabriele Di Piazza, managing director for Media and Entertainment in the Communications Sector at Microsoft. “Integrating automated business processes and systems, such as accounting, contracts, licensing and broadcast program management, with content workflows helps media companies react more quickly and intelligently to changing consumer demands, and can enable them to more effectively distribute and monetize content.”

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