Ben Waggoner's Blog

TIm Harader and John Bishop in Live HD web event Thur the 16th

2009-07-14T18:02:00Z

So, Millimeter is hosting a live web event about Live Smooth Streaming, featuring the always-awesome John Bishop of Inlet and our own (also excellent) Tim Harader. With those two together, expect an hour of real-world experience and context with awesome technical details and delivered with a charming Carolina lilt. It's Thursday, July 16th, at 2pm Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -5) You can register here: https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=153230&sessionid...(read more)

Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 announcement roundup

2009-07-11T03:35:00Z

So, Silverlight 3 was released today, and the Expression Studio is available in a public release candidate, including the awesome Expression Encoder 2. I'll have a bunch more to say about it, of course, but first off let me just provide links to the important stuff relating to the media side of things. Scott Guthrie's always-excellent blog post roundup: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/07/10/silverlight-3-released.aspx Technical overview of media features: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight...(read more)

My Silverlight 3 preview up at StreamingMedia.com

2009-07-09T19:11:00Z

The newest in my "Silverlight Guru" interviews with Troy Dreier is up now. It offers a concise overview of some of the big features we have coming for Silverlight 3 and with our encoding infrastructure. http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11268 And the previous installments are here: http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11188 http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=11140 We're doing these roughly once a month, mainly driven by questions from the Streaming Media forums or send...(read more)

My Michael Jackson Player

2009-07-07T13:46:00Z

The default player is only embedding at 848x wide. So I'll see if I've go the HTML-fu to embed big enough to get the full 1280x720....(read more)

Michael Jackson Memorial in live HD Smooth Streaming July 7th 10am PDT

2009-07-07T02:39:00Z

Just got some news: tomorrow's Michael Jackson memorial is going to be broadcast live in 720p Smooth Streaming by Sympatico / MSN inMusic . The feed is originating from Canada, but is not georestricted! I think this is the first globally available Live HD Smooth Streaming event. The event kicks off at 10am Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -8). It will hopefully be up as on-demand for 24 hours after, but we're still confirming the rights for that. Check back tomorrow AM for any updates. P.S. The Tour de...(read more)

Wimbledon Championships in live 720p

2009-06-27T17:33:21Z

One of the things distracting me from blogging lately has now been announced: the Wimbledon Championships are going to be live HD in Silverlight starting today (Saturday June 27th). Full details (once again) at the Silverlight Team Blog . This is going to be the biggest English language Live Smooth Streaming event so far, coming off the successful French International tennis tournament at Roland Garros. It’s amazing to think that this came together in just eight weeks, and amazing the amount of work...(read more)

Silverlight on Xbox 360 demo at Cannes

2009-06-25T17:33:00Z

Some of you have asked me about Scott Guthrie's twitter mention of the Xbox 360 Silverlight advertising demo at Cannes. So, yes, Silverlight 3 is coming to the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. We're mainly discussing this in the context of advertising at this point. We've got some more info up about it at the (reliably interesting and informative) Silverlight Team Blog . There's plenty to read there, but here's the overview: On Tuesday, June 22nd at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival 2009...(read more)

Project Starlight: Multicast Plug-in for Silverlight

2009-05-11T19:07:00Z

It’s Streaming Media East this week. Alas, I’m racing towards a book deadline, and so am skipping the show for the first time in years. I miss it; it’s long been one my favorite shows of the year, and an extremely productive place to meet with customers, partners, as well as a family reunion for us grizzled veterans of digital media. But a bunch of the rest of the Silverlight media team are there. They’re demoing our big news, but I can at least write about it. And that news is the Qumu Multicast...(read more)

First Moonlight 2.0 Preview Out – with Smooth Streaming

2009-05-07T21:27:00Z

Novell has just released the first Moonlight 2.0 Preview , dubbed Moonlight 1.9. It adds a bunch of new Silverlight 2 features, and offers compatibility with many more sites. Near and dear to my heart, it supports Smooth Streaming . Deep Zoom is also working. The mono team has tons of info, so here’s a link list. Miguel de Icaza has a detailed blog post Chris Toshok has some great details as well . Moonlight 1.9 Release Notes The test sites Moonlight targets , with the status of each Silverlight...(read more)

First Smooth Streaming User-Generated Content

2009-05-02T20:21:00Z

So, this is irrationally exciting for me; what's perhaps the first UGC (user-generated content) in Smooth Streaming. Two of our awesome evangelists, Tim Heuer and Arturo Toldeo were in New Zealand for WEB09 . They were invited to do a code-off with three Adobe representatives to build a cool app to raffle off the event prizes. Needless to say, they scored an overwhelming victory , even outnumbered 3:2. One would expect no less; no real news there. What I'm jazzed about is that our local NZ web whiz...(read more)

Cool Smooth Streaming demo site from CDNetworks

2009-05-02T00:09:00Z

Our friends at CDNetworks announced their adoption of Smooth Streaming last week. And now they’ve have made a very cool new Smooth Streaming demo site: http://www.nextcdn.com/Silverlight.htm . It builds on the SmoothHD and IIS.net demos with a very nice GUI, and an awesome use of some of Silverlight’s RIA style-features. For example, A magnifying glass with user control over magnification level. Which is crazy cool, and actually kind of useful when doing demos. It also offers manual stream selection...(read more)

NAB Day 1: Smooth Streaming released, Partners, 1080p in SL3, new VC-1

2009-04-21T02:05:00Z

So, it's the end of Monday here in Las Vegas, and I've already got Thursday voice. I wish I could explain with a great Vegas story involving cigars and bourbon, but it's actually a nasty virus from my three year old that's been hammering me for a couple of weeks. So I'm skipping the Akamai shindig to rest my voice and get some blogging done. There's lots of big news from Microsoft and our partners around Silverlight that I wanted to link to. This is just the highlights - there's tons more in the...(read more)

NAB 2009 Ben Waggoner Compression Party and booth schedule

2009-04-14T18:51:05Z

I was out sick last week, and I’m not emotionally prepared to admit that NAB is next week. But it shall be, and once again, I shall be there. Compressionist Party: Tuesday, April 21st, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm And, as many of you have emailed me to ask about, yes, we’ll be doing the Compressionist Party again. And I’ve finally got (most) of the details figured out. I think this may be the 8th annual incarnation, although I can’t quite remember when my wife and I threw the first of these in our Hilton suite...(read more)

Live Smooth Streaming Beta, Inlet's encoder, and the 2010 Winter Olympics

2009-03-19T23:03:00Z

Live Smooth Streaming Lots is going on at MIX, so as not to overwhelm with too many posts, I’ll try to triple-dip on this one. First, as part of Scott Guthrie’s keynote yesterday (now with transcript ), we announced that live streaming is coming for Smooth Streaming. The key advantages of Smooth Streaming are as applicable to live video as on-demand. And for high volume live events where scalability concerns can force users into “waiting rooms” or a lower tier of service, the offered scalability...(read more)

Silverlight 3 Beta - What's New for Media

2009-03-18T21:41:00Z

So, Silverlight 3 was released for public beta today, during Scott Guthrie’s keynote at MIX. There will be an on-demand version of it later on at Visitmix.com . There’s tons of info flowing around today, so I’m just going to focus on the media-related news that came out today. I’ll be posting a lot this week; check back for more details as they’re revealed. And feel free to ask questions in the comments area below. A developer release, not a consumer release Note that this is a developer release...(read more)