Chris Knowlton's Blog : Web Playlists

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

IIS Media Pack 1.0 Released

chriskno — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:19:29 GMT

Following up on our Smooth Streaming announcement last week, today we released IIS Media Pack 1.0! This first release of the IIS Media Pack features two IIS 7.0 extensions that focus on the intelligent delivery of video and audio to end users: Bit Rate Throttling, and Web Playlists.

Bit Rate Throttling

Bit Rate Throttling gives Web server administrators the ability to automatically meter the delivery of 11 built-in media file types, including Windows Media Video (.wmv), Flash Video (.flv), and MPEG-4 (.mp4) files. Additional media formats can be added, as can any non-media file type. By controlling how fast or how much data is downloaded to the client, site operators can see significant bandwidth cost savings for rich media content that has a high drop-off rate, such as videos on popular social media sites. When bandwidth is a concern, reducing the amount of data being sent to end users can increase the number of concurrent users per server.

Another feature of Bit Rate Throttling is dynamic throttling. When enabled, IIS can dynamically split your total available bandwidth allocation across all concurrent users. If you are billed for network usage based on a peak usage billing model, rather than number of datas transferred, this equitably shares extra available bandwidth among all of your users. As new users start to consume the extra bandwidth, dynamic throttling reduces bandwidth to each user, but ensures that the allocated bandwidth for each user will not fall below the specified bit rate for the content being consumed.

Web Playlists

Web Playlists let you deliver server-controlled media playlists from your Web server infrastructure, rather than using a dedicated streaming server. They enable you to control whether clients can Seek or Skip for each media asset, which lends itself very well to monetizing your content with pre-roll and in-stream ads. Web Playlists also obfuscate the location of media assets from the end user, and prevent client-side caching of those assets.

Web Playlists are simple to create and deliver. They are based on a standard playlist format (SMIL), are transformable to other common playlist types, and can be used with many popular media players. If you have existing business applications written in ASP, PHP, etc. to personalize the end user experience, it can be used with Web Playlists on your IIS 7.0 server to provide custom media playlists.

Call to Action

Download and try out the new IIS Media Pack 1.0 release! Add your comments below, or join us in the IIS Media forum, to let us know how well IIS Media Pack 1.0 meets your needs, and how we can make it even better for the next release.

Resources

IIS Media overview

Bit Rate Throttling details

Web Playlists details

IIS Media Pack downloads: 32-bit; 64-bit

Media delivery options in the Web Platform Installer

chriskno — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:18:24 GMT

Yesterday, we released the new Microsoft Web Application Installer, or Web AI, at www.microsoft.com/web. This tool for IIS7 allows you to simply install and get running with some of the most popular PHP and ASP.NET open source and community applications.

In case you missed it, we also released another tool on www.microsoft.com/web a few weeks ago: the Web Platform Installer (Web PI). Think of this, as Bill Staples put it, as "a one stop shop for downloading and installing the Microsoft Web Stack including IIS, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Visual Web Developer, all of the current IIS Extensions and more!" The IIS Media Pack features are among the IIS Extensions available in Web PI. If you use this tool, you will always get the latest production-ready versions of the IIS media features.

Here's the quickest way to find and install the IIS media features, using Web PI in five steps:

Launch Web PI: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9588072
Click on Run when prompted
After a moment, when the Web PI application appears, scroll down to the Media section
Check the features you want (see screenshot, below)
Click on Install and follow a few prompts

-Chris

Exciting media announcements at MIX08

chriskno — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 03:27:00 GMT

There were many very cool announcements and demos during Scott Guthrie's portion of the MIX08 Day 1 Keynote, and media technologies related to Silverlight were key among them. One 15-minute segment on media included talking points on Windows Media Services 2008 (WMS), the IIS7 Media Pack, Bit Rate Throttling screen shots and client experience, and Web Playlists in an advertising demo.

Here are links to information on some of the media technologies mentioned in the keynote:

Release of the Silverlight 2 Beta, bringing the ease and power of the .NET framework to a cross-platform cross-browser plug-in
Move Networks integration with Silverlight, a great example of a company making use of new Adaptive Streaming capabilities in Silverlight 2
Expression Encoder 2 Beta, which accelerates encoding, improves video quality, and includes new Silverlight templates
IIS 7.0 Media Pack Bit Rate Throttling, which allows you to save money and increase scalability when delivering media from your Web server
IIS 7.0 Media Pack Web Playlists, which allow you to control and monetize your content
Windows Media Services 2008, which provides over 2x the scalability of WMS 9.0 and now runs on the affordable Windows Web Server 2008

Media serving breakout session highlights for MIX08:

Wednesday afternoon, March 5th

IIS and WMS media serving were a key component in a session by Ben Waggoner on Encoding Video for Microsoft Silverlight Delivery Scenarios
Web Playlists were featured during an in-depth breakout session on Silverlight and the Advertising Opportunity that got into the details of the keynote advertising demo

Thursday morning, March 6th, Ed Maia showed a great demo of the IIS Media Pack during his session on Integrating Media in Silverlight Applications
Friday morning, March 7th, Charles Finkelstein will mention IIS and WMS media serving in the Overview of Expression Encoder 2 session with James Clarke

IIS-specific sessions at MIX08 include the following:

Wednesday afternoon, March 5th, Robert Cameron and Tito Leverette presented Bringing Hosters and Developers Together with IIS7 (including demos of Bit Rate Throttling and Web Playlists)
Thursday morning, March 6th, Drew Robbins presented Partying with PHP on Microsoft Internet Information Services 7
Thursday afternoon, March 6th, Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec presented Everything You Need to Know about Diagnostics and Debugging on Microsoft Internet Information Services 7

-Chris

Web Playlists, WMS 2008, and a new IIS Media Page

chriskno — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Today was a big day for IIS and WMS! As you may have seen among the many announcements, today we announced the launch of several media technologies:

..and the launch of IIS.NET 2.0, including a new IIS Media page.

Give us your feedback. :-)