Chris Knowlton's Blog : Smooth Streaming

Webinar: How to Deliver True HD with Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming

chriskno — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:56:00 GMT

On Thursday, October 15th, we will be presenting a webinar entitled "How to Deliver True HD with Silverlight and Smooth Streaming." During the one-hour webinar, we'll cover the following topics...

What Smooth Streaming is and why it is the future of online video delivery
How Smooth Streaming delivers HDTV-quality experiences over HTTP
How it has been successfully implemented for major live events and on-demand content
The end-to-end steps for delivering your content with Smooth Streaming

IIS Smooth Streaming is part of the recently-released IIS Media Services 3.0, a set of extensions for Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) that provide an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform. Part of that release was the beta of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, which allows developers to easily create Smooth Streaming experiences using Silverlight.

I will be co-presenting with Jaime Miles from Level 3, with whom we worked on Smooth Streaming of many high-visibilty live events over the last five months. You can learn more about some of those events on our IIS Smooth Streaming Showcase.

To learn more and register for this free event, please visit the event information page on StreamingMedia.com. For those that cannon attend the live event, an on-demand version will be available from that page starting on Friday.

-Chris

IIS Media Services 3.0, including IIS Live Smooth Streaming, has been released

chriskno — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:31:00 GMT

What Just Happened?

We just released IIS Media Services 3.0, a set of extensions for Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) that provide an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform. This includes the new IIS Live Smooth Streaming and the separate IIS Advanced Logging package.

In addition, we released the beta of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, which allows developers to easily create Smooth Streaming experiences using Silverlight. Supported features include PlayReady, DVR controls, instant replay, slow motion, multiple camera angles, alternate audio tracks, content protection, ad integration, in-stream data feeds, and more.

Market Impact

Since April, 2009, key broadcasters around the world have used beta versions of IIS Media Services 3.0 to successfully broadcast some of the world's premier live events. These include the Tour de France and the Roland Garros 2009 International French Open Tennis Tournament on France Télévisions; the IAAF Athletics World Championships and FINA Swimming World Championships on both France Télévisions and RAI; the FIFA Confederations Cup South Africa 2009 on RAI; and Champions League Soccer on BSkyB; as well as events such as the Michael Jackson Memorial on Sympatico/MSN inMusic and SKY News. In a combined effort with Microsoft, NBC Sports and others, Wimbledon Live delivered more than 6,500 minutes of live and on-demand Smooth Streaming video via a high-definition (HD), interactive online video experience. Each Sunday this Fall, NBC and Microsoft are broadcasting Sunday Night Football on-line in HD, utilizing live DVR controls, multiple camera angles, slow motion, ad integration, analytics, and other cutting-edge features. 26 such trial deployments are currently highlighted on the Smooth Streaming Showcase.

Component Overview

With this release, the key elements of the IIS media server platform now include:

Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of media over HTTP
Live Smooth Streaming, for live adaptive streaming of broadcast events
Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, for creating custom clients
Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player
Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content
Advanced Logging, with real-time client- and server-side logging
Application Request Routing (ARR), providing HTTP proxying and caching

Download the latest IIS Media offerings

You can download all of the IIS media server platform components using the Web Platform Installer button on the IIS Media page (http://www.iis.net/media).

Key new features:

See these blog posts to learn more about the key new features that are part of this release:

IIS Live Smooth Streaming: http://blogs.iis.net/jboch/archive/2009/10/09/rtw-of-live-smooth-streaming-is-now-live.aspx
IIS Advanced Logging: http://blogs.iis.net/vsood/archive/2009/10/12/iis-advanced-logging-1-0-released.aspx
IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit – Beta 1: http://blogs.iis.net/vsood/archive/2009/10/09/iis-smooth-streaming-player-development-kit-1-0-beta-1-released.aspx

Give the IIS Media server platform a try, and let us know what you think on our Forum.

-Chris

Smooth Streaming specifications now posted on-line

chriskno — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Smooth Streaming and Live Smooth Streaming, both part of IIS Media Services 3.0, have been generating a lot of interest from content owners who want to provide a seamless viewing experience up to 1080p for their end users. Even in the Beta stage of Live Smooth Streaming, there have been dozens of live trials at high-visibility events, such as the French Open and the FIFA Confederations Cup.

Today, we issued a press release highlighting this momentum and giving a preview of what we'll be demonstrating at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam later this week. To enable third parties who wish to build on IIS Smooth Streaming and the broader Microsoft media platform, we also released two specifications under the Community Promise Initiative:

The IIS Smooth Streaming Transport Protocol Specification describes how live and on-demand Smooth Streaming audio/video content is distributed and cached over an HTTP network.
The Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF) specification defines a standard multimedia file format for delivery and playback of protected multimedia content, and is highly compatible with IIS Smooth Streaming Transport.

To learn more, see the press release: Microsoft Raises the Bar for Delivery of Live HD Online Video Using HTTP.

-Chris

Smooth Streaming – What, Why, When, Where, and How

chriskno — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:48:00 GMT

Since we announced our new IIS Smooth Streaming extension last October with Akamai, we've been spending a lot of time engaging with very-interested customers and partners. In the course of these discussions, we hear a lot of frequently asked questions about Smooth Streaming, usually along these lines:

What is Smooth Streaming?
Can I use my existing Windows Media content with Smooth Streaming?
How is Smooth Streaming different from MBR [multiple-bit-rate] streaming?
Will Smooth Streaming work with Silverlight?
Is Smooth Streaming based on traditional streaming, or progressive download?
Does Smooth Streaming use proprietary streaming protocols?
Why is Microsoft shifting towards standards-based media delivery?
How do I create Smooth Streaming content?
Do I need to set up Windows Media Services to use Smooth Streaming?
What kind of support will Smooth Streaming have for H.264 content?
How does Smooth Streaming work?
Is Smooth Streaming more scalable than traditional streaming?
Are there cost advantages to using Smooth Streaming?

If you are wondering about the answers to any or all of these questions, then I highly recommend you read a new four-part Smooth Streaming blog series by Alex Zambelli, Microsoft technical evangelist. Topics include (in order):

A Brief History of Multi-Bitrate Streaming
The Birth of Smooth Streaming
Smooth Streaming Architecture
Encoding for Smooth Streaming (coming soon!)

If you haven't already done so, please check out the proof-of-concept Smooth Streaming site at SmoothHD.com.

-Chris