A few months ago, the IIS team received the charter of taking Media Serving forward, and merged together with the Windows Media server (WMS) team. This exciting new change at Microsoft was spurred by the fact that Video is becoming one of the most popular types of content on the Web, so what better way to ensure Web serving and Media serving work well together than to bring the engineering teams under one roof?
Bringing the teams together was the first step toward creating a more integrated Web and Video server, and today we're excited to announce the second step. I'm pleased to announce that Windows Media server (WMS) Beta 3 for Longhorn Server is now available for download on the Web. WMS is a very feature rich and popular media server, capable of live and on-demand broadcasting of audio and video. It has many cutting edge features that no other media server can touch, which is one of the reasons it is the most popular media server around - in the enterprise and on the internet.
WMS in Beta 3 adds some important new capabilities, including:
- Server Core installation option for Windows Media Services to provide an appliance-like streaming server in Web farms and lights-out locations – new for Beta 3
- A built-in Cache/Proxy plug-in to drive tens of thousands of server installations at the edges of private networks – new for Beta 3
- Remote Server Administration Tools for managing your Windows Media servers from computers running the Windows Vista operating system – new for Beta 3
- 2x the scalability of WMS 9.0 in Windows Server 2003 RTM on the same hardware
To ensure we're keeping up with the latest in video serving trends, we decided to remove WMS from Windows Server and instead make it available for download, paving the way for more frequent updates, out-of-band from Windows Server releases. Despite the fact that WMS is now a Web download, it still integrates just as seamlessly with Windows Server as ever, making it easy to manage and use. For more information on how to install WMS, see this KB article. For questions, see the Windows Media Server community forum. Expect to see more around Media Serving and IIS in the future!
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