Hello and welcome to the IIS Media Blog. I am very excited to be making my first post here and starting a deeper media discussion with the broader IIS community. IIS team members working on media will be posting here to talk about technologies in the pipeline and already here today that will help you better serve media content to your users.
So you may be asking yourself, "When did IIS start focusing on media delivery?" Microsoft recognized the trends in multimedia content on the internet - Web and media are becoming increasingly integrated. Today more than ever, music and videos are being served as part of websites and Web applications. Because of this convergence, and in order to build the most relevant technology possible, the Windows Media Services team has become part of the IIS team. Bill Staples announced and explained this change in this blog post. He also writes about the Windows Media Services product, which I will discuss briefly below.
There are really two options for delivering multimedia content today. For on-demand content you can use progressive download with a Web server. IIS sends the multimedia file as fast as available bandwidth allows, as it would any other file type. The client's player typically begins playing as soon as it has buffered a sufficient amount of content. However, more often than not, a visitor will only play a small portion of that downloaded content. When this happens, simple downloading is a somewhat inefficient method for serving media. It also makes little sense, in most cases, to send down data faster than the client can play it. IIS7 will address this - keep reading.
The other option for delivering media over the internet today is to use a fully featured streaming media server such as Windows Media Services (WMS). WMS has support for on-demand as well as live video streams, all of which can be delivered in a very efficient and cost-effective method. It can serve a different stream to each client and can also use multicast to broadcast a single stream to thousands of clients at once using only one stream's worth of bandwidth. WMS also ships with a number of features in the box that ensure a high quality end user experience.
Eric Woersching wrote an excellent post on using WMS, IIS7, and bit rate throttling as part of his MIX 2007 coverage, which you can check out here. As Eric noted, we are currently working on a new Media Pack that will move IIS7 beyond the simple download method for delivering on-demand content in the future. More on that coming soon. In the meantime, you can Go Live in production with the latest versions of IIS and WMS today by downloading Windows Server 2008 Beta 3, installing WMS, and signing the Go Live license.
We are looking forward to posting here often in the future!
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