This week, Next Generation Sports Network (NGSN) launched the beta version of their sports website and mobile apps that will allow for subscribers in the United States to view their favorite major soccer games from across the globe. NGSN has acquired the live broadcasting rights of 7 key European and South American soccer leagues including the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, and their new subscription service intends to rule the world when it comes to live and on demand sports. Later this year, NGSN plans to expand beyond soccer, these leagues and the United States to serve the needs of sports fans worldwide.

Last May, the NGSN team engaged with the Microsoft Services team in the Netherlands team to build a solution that met their specific requirement of:

• Scalable solution that can serve millions of subscribers
• Full end-to-end video workflows in the cloud
• Quick time to market

The team turned to Azure Media Services as a scalable, reliable, and global platform to meet these requirements. NGSN leverages the differentiating features of Azure Media Services – notably:

• End-to-end live streaming in the cloud including live transcoding and adaptive bitrate streaming
• End-to-end Video on demand including encoding of summaries and full matches with adaptive bitrate streaming
• Seamless CDN integration with premium CDN features and global reach, and point-and-click provisioning
• A growing ecosystem of partners in the OVP and technology spaces such as iStreamPlanet (Live Encoding), The Perform Group (Live Ingest & Commentary), Adyen (Payment processing), Avalara (Sales Tax calculation), The Capitals and Methylium (Apps).
• Azure Marketplace offerings from SendGrid (Email) and Aspera (Fast Upload).
• Seamless integration with other high value Microsoft Azure services such as websites, storage, SQL Database, Redis Cache, and the Push Notifications Service.

Within a few months NGSN was able to move from conception to implementation using the power of the Microsoft cloud. Microsoft Azure Media Services is a comprehensive platform built on a market-proven public cloud that media companies and enterprises can use to build scalable, cost-effective and end-to-end media solutions. This reduces the amount of money and resources which broadcasters and premium content owners have had to spend on hosting, managing, supporting and distributing their media. Click here to learn more about the NGSN Case Study. Click here to learn more and get started with Azure Media Services.