Microsoft and Walt Disney Studios form innovation partnership

Microsoft and The Walt Disney Studios have announced a five-year innovation partnership to pilot new ways to create, produce and distribute content on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Through The Walt Disney Studios' StudioLAB, a technology hub designed to create and advance storytelling, the companies will deliver cloud-based solutions to help accelerate innovation at The Walt Disney Studios for production and postproduction processes, or from "scene to screen.

"The cloud has reached a tipping point for the media industry, and it's not surprising that The Walt Disney Studios, which has its heritage based on a passion for innovation and technology, is at the forefront of this transformation," says Microsoft US president Kate Johnson.

"The combination of Azure's hyperscale capacity, global distribution, and storage and networking capabilities with Disney's strong history unlocks new opportunity in the media and entertainment space and will power new ways to drive content and creativity at scale.

"With Azure as the platform cloud for content, we're excited to work with the team at StudioLAB to continue to drive innovation across Disney's broad portfolio of studios.

"By moving many of our production and postproduction workflows to the cloud, we're optimistic that we can create content more quickly and efficiently around the world," says The Walt Disney Studios CTO Jamie Voris.

"Through this innovation partnership with Microsoft, we're able to streamline many of our processes so our talented filmmakers can focus on what they do best.

Microsoft and Disney — working closely with leading global media technology provider Avid — are already demonstrating that the kinds of demanding, high-performance workflows the media and entertainment industry requires can be deployed and operated with the security offered by the cloud, while unlocking substantial new benefits and efficiencies and enabling production teams to rethink the way they get their work done.

Building on Microsoft's strategic cloud alliance with Avid, the companies have already produced several essential media workflows running in the cloud today, including collaborative editing, content archiving, active-backup and production continuity.

Bringing these complex workflows into production using Avid solutions such as the Avid MediaCentral platform, MediaCentral | Cloud UX, Avid NEXIS | Cloud storage and Avid Media Composer — all running natively on Azure — will provide the foundation for helping transform content creation and content management to overcome today's operational pressures, as well as pave the way for ongoing innovation.