Microsoft Corp. wants to help organizations get as much use out of their video assets as the rest of their unstructured data with a new set of cloud services for processing visual content that rolled out today. Azure Media Analytics provides tools for performing image stabilization and other mundane tasks as well as more advanced use cases like automated motion detection.

Redmond sees organizations utilizing the functionality mainly to filter video from their surveillance cameras and thereby spare their security staff the hassle of pursuing false positives. The service should come particularly handy in industries like the real-estate market, where a company can have a lot of physical assets to monitor. It should be useful for retailers as well, which are in turn also able to take advantage of the facial recognition system that Microsoft is launching together with the motion detection functionality.

Azure Media Analytics provides the ability to gauge the sentiment of shoppers based on facial expressions and even pick out high-value customers from the crowd who might be receptive to targeted sales offers. The feature could potentially be used similarly during large corporate events, as well as in practically every other setting that enables a brand to interact with customers directly.

In addition, Microsoft’s new bundle also targets technology companies that manage a lot of user-created content with a filtering service for automatically removing inappropriate content. It’s offered alongside a summarization function that makes it possible to quickly generate a description based on the most interesting snippets from a clip, which Redmond sees coming particularly useful for longer videos. The capabilities of the Azure Media Analytics are set to be showcased at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show next week, where the software giant will no doubt do its best to promote the suite to the numerous potential customers in attendance.

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