As promised here is the second part of my MIX blog from yesterday. I planned on doing this from my hotel room this morning but I got in too late after the MIX party and had to sleep in a bit. But that is the great thing about MIX; you get to learn about some incredibly interesting technology during the day and then at night, meet and talk with the people building and using that technology.
Delivering a more media-rich experience through your Web site is certainly an interesting technical topic that was popular to discuss at MIX. IIS7 and Windows Media Services can both be a big part of your site’s media solution and since I work on both of these technologies, I tried to attend as many sessions as I could on the topic. The media session I got a chance to attend on Monday was DEV13 - Creating and Delivering Rich Media and Video on the Web with Silverlight, Microsoft Expression Studio, and Windows Server Codename "Longhorn" (Check back on this link, there should be a video recording of the session there in a few days).
The session actually has three speakers covering three different sets of Microsoft technologies for media Web. First, Brad Abrams, Group Product Manager for the UI Framework & Services (ASP.NET AJAX + some other cool stuff) discussed using a Silverlight player for video and an ASP.NET AJAX enhanced site for great user experience. Then, Chris Knowlton, the Program Manager for Windows Media Services explained different options for delivering media over the Web, including progressive downloads via IIS7 and streaming via WMS, both in Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” Beta 3. Lastly, James Clarke, a program manager on the Expression Media team, talked about using Expression Media to encode user generated content on the fly.
I want to mostly discuss what I learned about streaming media, WMS and IIS7 in Chris’s part of the talk, but I should give some recognition to Brad and James’s parts of the talk, since they were excellent. Brad went into detail on ways to use ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight to deliver a compelling Web user experience that customers will find engaging enough to get emotionally connected with the site. Little client-side things can go a long way, like using the UpdatePanel feature to make the site more responsive or using an auto-suggest search box to help users know what to actually search. If you want to take a closer look at these features, Brad’s got the entire demo site on his blog to download now. James showed off Expression Media for encoding but what I was most impressed with was his Windows Live Writer add-on for injecting video into a blog post. I have got to try this out on my next post.
So to finally talk about Chris’s section; it really helped me understand the different options customers have for delivering media through their sites at the lowest cost possible. Before setting up any servers you should think about if outsourcing is right for you. Silverlight Streaming, just announced at MIX, is a free Windows Live service for storing up to 4GB of video, cached on edged servers for strong performance anywhere around the world. You can also use CDN (Content Distribution Networks) like Akamai or a Peer To Peer service like Skinkers. Chris also shown some new data that illustrates how media is growing in importance on the Web and how cost effective Windows Media is vs. some other solutions out there.
If you’re going to do it yourself, you can stream with WMS or you have customers progressively download pre-recorded content from IIS7. Both are available in Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” Beta 3. You can download WMS and Beta 3 with IIS7 today and put both of these technologies into a production environment under the IIS7 Go Live license. Either way, you are going to want to keep your bandwidth costs down by throttling your bandwidth according to bit rate of the media you are delivering. You don’t want to transmit video to your customers much faster than they can watch it because you pay for sending those bytes whether they watch them or not.
Bit rate throttling is not new to WMS in Longhorn Server, but it will be for IIS7. The team is working on a new media pack for IIS7 with a module that will deliver this functionality complete with an add-on to IIS Manager for configuring it. Besides twice the scalability of WMS in Windows Server 2003, WMS in Longhorn Server has a bunch of great new capabilities for streaming media. WMS can deliver instant-on/always-on streaming for broadband users and dramatic improvement in the streaming experience for live users.
WMS also supports live streaming straight from an encoder (e.g. Windows Media Encoder, the new Expression Media encoder). Finally, Chris explained how WMS in Longhorn Server supports caching media content on proxy servers. This is great when you want to transmit video in a distributed work environment and have a proxy server relay the video to a bunch of users at a branch office without having to have each of the users pull down the video directly from the source.
Each of the speakers covered way more than I could comment on in this blog. If you are delivering video over the internet or are considering implementing this, I highly suggest you watch this session. It’s quite an impressive solution these technologies can offer when you use them together.
And with that I will leave you with a picture of the speaker himself (left) at dinner with me and Alex (right) in Vegas on Monday night…
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