The Walt Disney Studios and Microsoft have announced a five-year partnership to create, produce and distribute content on Microsoft Azure.

“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,” Microsoft president Kate Johnson said in a prepared statement. “The combination of Azure’s hyperscale capacity, global distribution, and industry-leading storage and networking capabilities with Disney’s strong history of industry leadership 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 … to continue to drive innovation across Disney’s broad portfolio of studios.”

The partnership appears to be an expansion of a year-old Microsoft and Disney partnership with Avid, through which the firms have created a series of content creation workflows that run on Azure. “The companies have already produced several essential media workflows running in the cloud today, including collaborative editing, content archiving, active backup, and production continuity,” Johnson notes. “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.”