Archives
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Announcing Windows Azure Media Services and MPEG-DASH support
This week at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas we made two big announcements:
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Extending Smooth Streaming Reach
Smooth Streaming has been a pivotal technology of the Microsoft Media Platform since its introduction in IIS Media Services 2.0 in 2009. And though it’s been commonly associated with Silverlight over the years, those familiar with Smooth Streaming architecture and the Smooth Streaming Media Element probably know that the relationship between Smooth Streaming and Silverlight was never an exclusive one. For starters, the Smooth Streaming Protocol Specification and the Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF) Specification have been public for years. After all, at its heart Smooth Streaming is not much more than a combination of HTTP requests, XML and fMP4 parsing, download heuristics and video/audio decoding. It’s a fairly open, standards-based technology that has very few dependencies on the client platform.