John A. Bocharov's Blog : Smooth Streaming

RTW of Live Smooth Streaming is now… Live.

jboch — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:22:00 GMT

We’re excited to announce that IIS Media Services 3.0, which includes the RTW of Live Smooth Streaming is now available for download (WebPI, x86, x64). This release builds on the Beta’s functionality that delivered:

Smooth bit-rate switching that provides your users the best possible quality at that moment in time
Massive scalability through the use of cacheable HTTP
Integrated Network DVR

The team has been hard at work since the Beta making the product better. So what’s new in RTW? Here are the highlights...

High Availability – multi-tier scalability and failover
24/7 and long-running event support
Ad insertion support

Try it out today by following the steps in one of the following walkthroughs:

You can also download the new Smooth Streaming Deployment Guide for a step-by-step description of the encoding, server, and client set up for Smooth Streaming in a single document. Finally, don’t forget to check out the IIS Media Services Showcase, which gives a visual overview of the IIS Smooth Streaming deployments to date and a flavor for the kinds of experiences they delivered to users.

Please don’t hesitate to provide feedback on this release. Look forward to hearing about your experience…

IIS Media Services 2.0, Smooth Streaming is RTW!

jboch — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:53:39 GMT

Today marks the start of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas, and we brought our “A” game with a press release announcing the immediate availability of IIS Media Services 2.0 RTW (WebPI, x86, x64), including the first full production release of Smooth Streaming. You can try the experience for yourself on iis.net, and learn more on the media landing page.

We are also pleased to have a key group of encoding ISVs announcing Smooth Streaming support with us, including Digital Rapids, Envivio Inc., Grab Networks Inc. (Anystream), Inlet Technologies, Rhozet, Telestream Inc., VBrick Systems Inc., ViewCast Corp. and Winnov Inc. This gives our customers lots of great choices for encoding compatible content and integrating Smooth Streaming delivery with their existing workflows. If you’re at NAB, come by the Microsoft booth to see demos of On-Demand and Live Smooth Streaming, including Live streams protected by PlayReady encryption.

There are two releases available side-by-side on iis.net and through the Web Platform Installer:

IIS Media Services 2.0 RTW – the production-ready release announced today. Includes:

Smooth Streaming
Bitrate Throttling
Web Playlists

IIS Media Services 3.0 Beta – a preview of new features in 3.0 made available in March at MIX. Includes:

Live Smooth Streaming
Advanced Logging

For production deployments, you’ll want to use the 2.0 RTW, but if you are looking to try the full range of functionality available, get them both! And as always, we’d love to hear your feedback. Feel free to use this feedback thread, or start a new one for your specific question.

I will post more in depth on the technology, common questions, and couple of interesting scenarios in the coming weeks…

Live Smooth Streaming: Try It Now, No Encoder Required

jboch — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:30:45 GMT

Announced at the MIX09 keynote, Live Smooth Streaming was released for download (WebPI, x86, x64) on Wednesday. You don’t need a live encoder to try this at home. Read below for the how…

What is Live Smooth Streaming?

Live Smooth Streaming provides the same great user experience as its Video On-Demand counterpart, using the same scalable delivery method that takes full advantage of commodity HTTP caches. In short, a user experience that…

Starts playback and seeks instantly
Does not stop to buffer
Deliver the best quality your bandwidth and CPU allow at the moment

Live Smooth Streaming archives incoming data and provides a full Network Digital Video Recorder (DVR). It works just like a TiVo for online video, with support for replay, pause, and jumping back to the live broadcast. If you start watching a broadcast late, you can always jump back to see what you missed, and then resume watching the live broadcast.

How can I try Live Smooth Streaming?

See the “Getting Started” walkthrough for detailed instructions. In a nutshell the steps are:

Install and configure the Live Smooth Streaming Beta (WebPI, x86, x64)
Install the sample content (Big Buck Bunny) and the Live Smooth Streaming Starter Kit
Simulate the Live broadcast using the pushencoder Tool

Open a browser and enjoy the experience. The pushencoder tool in the Starter Kit also allows you to simulate a live broadcast from any Smooth Streaming assets you have created with Expression Encoder. From a command line, simply supply the URL of the publishing and the path to the .ism file for your asset with a command like:

pushencoder64 <url-of-publishingpoint> <ism-file>

Can the Beta really do Live broadcasts?

Yes! At Thursday’s IIS Media Services session MIX09, we (IIS and Inlet) had a lot of fun pulling back the curtain on an end-to-end broadcast setup including an uncompressed signal source, encoders, server, and client. You can watch the recording of the session online (seek to 60:00 for the Live Smooth Streaming demo) at:

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T56F

Where can I learn more?

Check out the IIS Media Services page, the Live Smooth Streaming feature page, and the walkthrough on “Creating and Managing Publishing Points”. Please feel free leave any questions you may have as comments, and I will gladly address them in a future post.

On behalf of the entire team, it’s our pleasure to make the Beta available for download. We’d love to hear about your experience and any feedback you may have.

--John

Beta Release of Smooth Streaming Now Available

jboch — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:15:10 GMT

It is my pleasure to announce that the Smooth Streaming Beta is now available. Get it here for x86, x64, or using the Web Platform Installer (see below for details). In case you’re hearing about Smooth Streaming for the first time here... the technology adapts the bit rate of the content in throughout playback to provide your viewers with an experience that starts up instantly, seeks instantly, and delivers the best quality that network and CPU conditions will allow for any point in time. It does this while communicating using fully cacheable requests and responses, so that the power of massive HTTP caching infrastructures can provide your viewers with the best Quality of Service. Check out the extension page, the initial post, or Smooth HD to learn more.

To make it easier to get started with Smooth Streaming, we will be releasing a package of sample content imminently. This package contains a test client that simulates changes in network conditions, and shows the history of bit rate and frame rate changes to make it easy to visualize how the experience evolves over time:

You can also deploy any content created for IIS Smooth Streaming using Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1 and start streaming. There are several walkthroughs available to make it easy to get started with the functionality in this release:

Getting Started – setting up your IIS Smooth Streaming server and deploying sample content
Exploring Bit Rate Changes – using the User Experience Simulator (shown above)
Managing Your Presentations – using the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager to manage your content

We’d love to hear your feedback once you’ve had a chance to try the release first-hand: use this link to tell us what you think. On behalf of the entire Smooth Streaming team, we’re really excited to make this Beta broadly available, and look forward to your feedback!

--John

The Web Platform Installer is a great new way to get the web server (including your favorite IIS Extensions), database, and application framework in one simple operation. To get Smooth Streaming, be sure to select either the “Complete” install, or check “IIS Smooth Streaming Beta” if selecting “Your Choice”:

Smooth Streaming Questions? We’ve Got Answers!

jboch — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:56:08 GMT

Since we announced Smooth Streaming in October, the team has been hard at work preparing the feature for broad public release (the answer to the obvious question of “When?” is “Very soon!”... please stay tuned for details) and addressing feedback from customers in the early adoption program. But, of course, the Web (and especially the blogosphere) never stands still:

RunAs Radio produced a podcast focused on Smooth Streaming and, more generally, streaming media (thanks to Richard and Greg for kindly inviting me to be on their show)
Chris Knowlton highlights Smooth Streaming customer questions and the answers provided by Ben Waggoner and Alex Zambelli in a downright encyclopedic set of blog posts
Updates to SmoothHD.com site that should reduce bandwidth utilized when the window is too small to see a higher quality picture from a higher bit rate
Some interesting questions on my initial post, addressed below…

And although this last topic is not about Smooth Streaming as such, it highlighted one of the needs the technology fulfills. Coverage of the U.S. Presidential Inauguration drove traffic records across the Web and set a new bar for customer expectations. However, the day also caused frustration and demonstrated the challenges of scaling to the size of the audience, as captured in The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us. When we demo Smooth Streaming, the end-user experience is the first thing people notice, but scale is where the technology truly gets its opportunity to shine. It never ceases to amaze me how massive (and massively distributed) the Web’s HTTP delivery infrastructures really are. With Smooth Streaming, we are betting that the way to reach the growing audience is to integrate video delivery into these infrastructures, rather than trying to scale out the comparatively far smaller parallel networks for streaming.

My last post sparked a couple of interesting questions that merit some clarification:

How does Smooth Streaming relate to what Move Networks is doing? From my perspective, what we offer with Smooth Streaming is a platform technology while Move Networks is a one-stop-shop service solution provider that innovates on the Silverlight platform. So I would not view this as a competing offering – the intent is to create a vibrant ecosystem of great services for streaming media to Silverlight, in which Move Networks continues and will continue to be a strong and well-respected player.
How does Smooth Streaming relate to Windows Media multiple bit rate (WM-MBR) technology? WM-MBR focused on the challenge of simplifying delivery to client that may have differing “last-mile” connection speeds, and provided a format that allowed all the bitrates to reside in a single file, along with a client and server that negotiate the delivery bit rate. Smooth Streaming addresses a similar challenge and several others:

The Last Mile: Smooth Streaming takes the bit rate switching concept a step further by making the switches seamless, and adjusting the bit rate every few seconds as needed to ensure the optimal experience.
Scaling Out for Global Delivery: Smooth Streaming addresses this by making the media communication HTTP-cacheable, accomplished by fragmenting the media into independently decodable units for transport. We chose a format that enables the server to fragment the media in an efficient and scalable fashion, but unfortunately fragmentation that is not a scenario WM-MBR was designed for.
Future-Proofing the Algorithms: By leveraging managing code in Silverlight to host the bit rate decision algorithms, Smooth Streaming makes it easy to evolve these algorithms over time, customize them for a content library, and optimize them for a specific delivery network, all without changes to the client runtime.

Windows Media Services will continue to offer first-class support for WM-MBR streaming to Windows Media Player, and we’ll look to provide migration tools from existing formats in response to customer demand.

Hope this helps, and of course I’m looking forward to getting more great questions when the bits are public.

--John

I’ve seen the future and the future is… Smooth!

jboch — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:47:04 GMT

Now playing at SmoothHD.com – a preview of video delivery using IIS Smooth Streaming.

Announced this morning in a joint press release by Microsoft and Akamai, IIS Smooth Streaming enables video delivery at the best quality each viewer’s network and hardware will allow. Smooth Streaming builds on the Adaptive Streaming technology developed, tested, and proven by Microsoft in delivering the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the Web. By using standard HTTP requests and responses instead of proprietary streaming protocols requiring proprietary edge servers, IIS is able to offer tremendous cost savings and scalability advantages relative to competing solutions. Finally, IIS simplifies management on the server by minimizing the number of files required.

We’ve put a great deal of work into getting this technology right, so I would encourage you to go to SmoothHD.com, try the experience for yourself, and tell us what you think! So let’s take a look at what IIS Smooth Streaming means…

From a Technical Perspective

Smooth Streaming is a new IIS 7.0 extension that delivers fragments of media content designed for Silverlight-based players, powering the same great Adaptive Streaming user experience seen throughout the NBC Olympics. The upcoming release of Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is used to encode media at a spectrum of bit rates, and publish it directly to the IIS server. The player requests fragments from IIS by using RESTful URLs like…
http://SmoothHD.com/Media.ism/QualityLevels(1024000)/Fragments(video=20000000)
and the IIS server efficiently locates and delivers the corresponding media fragment to the player. Previous iterations of the technology provided a great user experience but proved difficult to manage. IIS greatly simplifies management by reducing the number of files on disk by several orders of magnitude without compromising the quality of playback.

From a Content Delivery Perspective

IIS Smooth Streaming provides industry-leading Total Cost of Ownership by using standard HTTP requests and responses. This allows it to align naturally with existing HTTP delivery and scale-out infrastructures as requests and responses can be proxied and cached by existing edge servers and HTTP appliances. Unlike competing streaming solutions, delivering Smooth Streaming to clients does not require investing in deploying, configuring, and managing a swarm of proprietary distribution servers. IIS Smooth Streaming was created with scalability and HTTP cacheability as first-class design goals, to help our customers minimize the cost per megabyte delivered.

From a Content Producer’s Perspective

Customers will be able to use a new encoding option in Expression Encoder 2 SP1 to author media content ready for Smooth Streaming. Expression Encoder 2 will also include a plug-in that allows customers to publish the media directly to IIS server with a single click, and Akamai has announced plans for a similar plug-in that allows users to publish content directly to the Akamai network. Expression Encoder also allows customer to apply templates that provide both visual styles and Silverlight heuristics algorithms that power the user experience. In short, the products work together to make authoring the content and delivering it to viewers easy and accessible to everyone.

From a Developer’s Perspective

Silverlight and Expression Encoder give developers the power to tune the end-user playback experience for their target audience, and to integrate Smooth Streaming playback into their Silverlight applications. Akamai’s Open Video Player initiative will also made it easy for developers to integrate Smooth Streaming video delivery with value-added services such as advertising and analytics.

Once again, please try the technology for yourself at SmoothHD.com, and also by checking out Expression Encoder 2 SP1 when it becomes available. We’d love to hear what your experience is, and how we can make it better.

--John A. Bocharov

Program Manager, IIS Smooth Streaming