This service will provide end-to-end, service-level agreement (SLA)-based media delivery services on Azure, giving broadcasters and media companies the flexibility and scalability that are essential in today’s rapidly changing media environment. Bringing the most relevant content to the cloud and providing innovative services covering the entire video value chain – ingest, playout, and delivery – will enable media companies to scale and address the consumer’s growing demand for a premium viewing experience on every screen.

SES leads the industry with its worldwide reach of over 355 million TV households (or 1 billion people) and distributes over 8,200 channels via satellite. With SES’s recent unification of its wholly owned video services subsidiary, MX1, with its SES Video business unit, SES now manages over 525 channels and delivers more than 8,400 hours of online video streaming, including over 620 hours of premium sports and live events per day. Going to market with a unified solution for video infrastructure and services means that SES will accelerate the rollout of hybrid linear and non-linear content delivery services and solutions with unprecedented global reach.

At IBC2019, SES will demonstrate two initial use cases for its new service with Azure. Visitors to the SES stand (1.B51) will be able to witness first-hand:

• 
  Fully managed playout services on Azure, including master playout and localised playout including ad detection and replacement
• The advantages of efficient, high-quality multichannel live IP encoding managed 24/7 by SES on Azure

“Our collaboration with Microsoft Azure will enable us to take our portfolio of media services and distribution solutions to the next level,” said Ferdinand Kayser, CEO of SES Video. “Our cloud-enabled media service will be unique to the industry and will offer scalability and flexibility, along with increased broadcast quality of service, thanks to the latest AI and machine learning capabilities.”

Tad Brockway, Corporate Vice President, Azure Storage, Media, & Edge, Microsoft Corp. “Broadcasters and media companies need solutions to deliver high-quality video services globally with maximum flexibility, scalability, and reliability. We look forward to working with SES to deliver these new solutions on Azure.”

SES also announced an expanded relationship with Microsoft that enables connectivity between SES’s multi-orbit satellite systems and Azure ExpressRoute. This initiative builds on the companies’ broader strategic collaboration and their shared common vision to reach everyone with intelligent cloud, media and network solutions.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, California –SES is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to explore ways to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to simplify operation of its communications satellite fleet.

“We have a very large fleet and tens of thousands of telemetry signals on each of our satellites,” Valvanera Moreno, SES system architecture and innovation manager, said Oct. 10 at Satellite Innovation 2018 here.“The next satellites will have even more data to process. That’s why we think this area has a lot of value.”

Like SES, government agencies and space companies looking for ways to apply artificial intelligence to various problems they face.

Orbital Insight, a geospatial analytics company, relies on artificial intelligence to help answer questions its customers ask.

“Artificial intelligence enables human analysts to extract maximum value from imagery,” said Devin Brande, Orbital Insight advance programs director. “We are on the cusp of combining modern remote sensing with other sources of intelligence to create a rich picture.”

Raytheon’s Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance business established a capability center to focus its artificial intelligence and machine learning expertise. “As we grow that into a fundamental capability of our business, the goal is to dissolve the capability center and have it become part of the DNA of our business,” said Gabriel Comi, Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services’ Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy Capability Center chief architect.

CosmiQ Works, one of four laboratories established by In-Q-Tel to explore how the U.S. government can take apply new and emerging commercial space capabilities to solve national security problems, and its partners Radiant Solutions, DigitalGlobe and Amazon Web Services holds competitions, called SpaceNet, that offer cash prizes to competitors who develop automated methods to detect road networks or other landmarks from high-resolution satellite imagery.

CosmiQ Works makes the winning algorithms open source. “Hopefully, that helps our government partners and the commercial sector,” said Adam Van Etten, CosmiQ Works technical director. “Sometimes these algorithms that get a lot of press don’t translate to our domain.”

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