Windows Azure Media Services is now generally available and will be free-of-charge until 18 February 2013. After which, users will be charged according to their usage, read more at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/

Media Services offer the flexibility, scalability, and reliability of a cloud platform to handle high quality media experiences. It includes cloud-based versions of many existing technologies, such as ingest, encoding, format conversion, content protection and both on-demand and live streaming capabilities.