Microsoft's Azure cloud gets live video encoding for everyone

Microsoft has made its Live Encoding service generally available as part of a slew of updates announced Thursday for the Azure Media Services suite. 

Live Encoding lets broadcasters send one video stream to Microsoft's cloud and get it encoded there into an adaptive bitrate stream that can be sent to different types of devices. That means a video producer can send a single high-quality stream to the cloud that can then be streamed in lower quality to people on slower connections. 

It's a tool that has already been used by partners like NBC in high-pressure situations including streaming video from the 2014 Winter Olympics. Microsoft has the potential to draw in both large companies with massive streaming loads and smaller operations that handle far less than an Olympics worth of video.

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