On February 16^th 2015, over 3,000 medical students and professionals tuned in to the world’s first 24-Hour Live Worldwide Robotic Surgery Event (WRSE), powered by Microsoft Azure Media Services. The event, focused on robotic surgery training and certification, streamed from 10 leading robotic surgery centers of excellence from four continents and broadcasted live for 24 continuous hours. The day’s events were delivered through Microsoft’s partner technology LiveArena and LiveArena® Publisher™, which lets users manage and distribute live and on-demand video using Microsoft’s Azure Media Services.

WRSE was the first event of its kind, allowing expert surgeons to share their expertise without travel and providing a valuable learning asset for the medical community. Historically, conducting live surgery events was expensive, risky, and required surgeons performing complex procedures in unfamiliar environments. Streaming the event live using Azure Media Services and LiveArena® was significantly more cost efficient, and more importantly, provided greater accessibility to student viewers. The videos were streamed in real-time and also allowed for pausing or rewinding – leveraging Microsoft Azure Media Services Cloud DVR capabilities, including seamless live to VOD transition for later viewing.

With Microsoft Azure Media Services anyone – from broadcasters, to cable providers to surgeons – has everything they need to quickly build great, extremely scalable, end-to-end media solutions for streaming to consumers on any device. For example, you can:

• Stream a live event of training videos to employees in your company,
• Stream video content for your web-site,
• Build a premium video-on-demand service

For more details on this historic event go to www.wrse24.org. To learn more about how Azure Media Services can support your global streaming needs, please visit www.azure.com/media