Search results matching tag 'Silverlight'

Streaming Media West

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:38:41 GMT

This week, I'm at Streaming Media West in San Jose, California. Seeing the sun, blue skies and relatively warm weather is a pleasant change from the rain swept northwest.
Today is a special pre-conference half-day workshop on Live Broadcasting with Silverlight and Windows Media, which my colleague Chris Knowlton is running. We're videotaping it for posterity and will get it posted as soon as we can.
On Wednesday morning, Marc Whitten, GM of Xbox Live will be delivering the keynote at 9am and on Wednesday afternoon, Steven Woodward from Microsoft and Mike Moser from Vertigo will be delivering a special session on real-world Smooth Streaming using a very recent and timely event as an example.
The exhibition runs Tuesday evening through Thursday afternoon and we'll have a special 20 minute presentation of Smooth Streaming on the show floor on Thursday at 1pm.
If you want to attend the conference or exhibition and don't yet have a pass, you can register at a discounted rate by going to https://secure.infotoday.com/forms/default.aspx?form=smw2009 and using the VIPMSFT as the promo code.

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 and Player SDK released!

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:47:44 GMT

Last week was a big one for Smooth Streaming! IIS Media Services 3.0, the IIS7 media extensions pack containing Smooth Streaming, has completed its 6-month beta development cycle and has been released to Web. You can download it here:

http://www.iis.net/extensions/LiveSmoothStreaming

Chris Knowlton has written an excellent summary of everything that’s gone into this release. Here’s just a brief list of components:

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

Innovative France 24 Silverlight Player

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:03:00 GMT

France 24, the French 24 hour news channel, has introduced a new Silverlight-based player that also uses Smooth Streaming to deliver an innovative take on live news. You can check out the player and their blog post (in French.)

Here’s the quick summary of the France 24 French blog post:

“Imagine that each spoken word in a video is automatically transcribed and associated with a recorded video sequence. Add to that a program grid, real-time viewer data and vote tallying. Then present all of this in a high definition player that enables you to control the playback and you get the latest prototype presented by France 24 and built in collaboration with the R&D teams at Yacast Media and Microsoft.”

What does this actually let you do? Well a number of really neat things:

Live SD broadcast content at up to 1.3Mbps using Smooth Streaming, so you get the best quality video to suit your bandwidth and CPU (Smooth Streaming isn’t just for HD).
The player timeline is the program grid. Instead of blindly guessing a particular program might start, you actually see the program listings under the timeline. Clicking on the back or forward arrows move the timeline by an hour.
Tags (metadata) of keywords are automatically extracted from the program audio. The tags are shown as a pop-up over the timeline and provide another navigation option.
A real-time graph showing the volume of viewers of the stream.
A real-time bubble chart showing voting – the votes represent users who recommend a particular portion of the program.

Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:58:41 GMT

We’ve been nominated in three categories for the 2009 Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards. There are 22 categories in all and run the gamut from content to technologies. You can enter your votes here. We’ve been nominated in the following categories:

Voting closes on October 16th and the winners will be announced at Streaming Media West in San Jose on November 18th, so if you feel inclined to vote please do so soon.

Obviously, I’m not asking you to vote specifically for us, but if you don’t know about the awards then you can’t vote so I thought I’d at least let everyone know and hope for the best :)

Roll Up! Roll Up! Get Your Smooth Streaming Here!

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:48:57 GMT

Want to know more about Smooth Streaming in the real world? Join us on Thursday October 15th at 11am Pacific time for a special live web broadcast hosted by Streaming Media Magazine.

Dan Rayburn of Streaming Media Magazine will moderate the discussion between our very own Chris Knowlton who is a senior program manager in the IIS team at Microsoft, and Jaime Miles who is the head of European Architecture and Engineering for Level 3 Communications in Europe.

The webcast will cover how to deliver HD quality web video over HTTP. Chris will talk about the technology and benefits of Smooth Streaming, and Jaime will give real-world examples of how Level 3 have implemented the technology for recent high-profile live events such as Roland Garros and the UEFA Super Cup.

Head over to StreamingMedia.com to sign-up!

70th Anniversary of The Wizard of Oz

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:02:29 GMT

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, Netflix is doing two very special events:

A live “Songs from Oz” concert in Central Park featuring songs from the movie. The concert is being streamed on-demand using Silverlight Smooth Streaming technology.
A special free presentation of the remastered movie itself on Sunday October 3rd for Netflix subscribers and non-subscribers alike, also streamed using Silverlight Smooth Streaming technology.

The events have been made possible through the combination of Netflix, Microsoft, iStreamPlanet and Limelight.

You can find out more about the event by visiting the Netflix Wizard of Oz site.

Canal+ Launches FOOT+ Soccer Channel in Silverlight

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:37:47 GMT

Groupe CANAL, the premiere pay television channel in France with 10.6 million subscribers, is adopting Microsoft Silverlight for their FOOT+ online streaming video service. devoted to covering French and European soccer. FOOT+, which is an additional subscription service to Canal+ customers, provides live and on-demand access to French and European soccer including the French Ligue 1, UEFA Champions League and the Europa League. More information can be found here and in the French press release (PDF).

NBC Sunday Night Football - Powered by Silverlight and Smooth Streaming

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:39:20 GMT

Has it really been 5 months since my last post? Well, one of the reasons why I’ve been so inactive here is because I’ve been busy working on this project:

Today we are launching the NBC Sunday Night Football website: http://snfextra.nbcsports.com featuring a truly cutting-edge video player powered by Microsoft Silverlight and IIS7 Smooth Streaming.

The first game, Titans vs Steelers, is to be broadcast today (September 10th) at 5 pm PST. The next game, Bears vs Packers, is scheduled for this Sunday (September 13th) at 5 pm PST. Due to NBC broadcast rights for SNF, the website is restricted to U.S.-based users only (sorry, expats!).

The project is the culmination of over 5 months of hard work involving NBC, Microsoft (technical project management and core technologies), iStreamPlanet (video encoding services and realtime data integration), Vertigo (player design and development), Akamai (content delivery), Inlet (video encoding technology), Conviva (realtime content delivery analytics), Omniture (web analytics) and DoubleClick (advertising).

The SNF player will feature:

Live Smooth Streaming video, for all of the content, all of the time
Seamless on-demand switching between the 720p HD main broadcast feed and four 480p SD alternate camera angles
Full motion thumbnail previews of all alternate camera angles
Seeking, pausing, fast forwarding and rewinding of live video
Slow motion and instant replay
Realtime game stats data
Realtime timeline markers and chapter menu providing instant access to all key game plays

There are a ton of other features I’m probably forgetting right now, but I will make sure to follow up soon with another blog post covering all those as well as the technical video details of the project (bitrates, resolutions, codecs, etc).

Tech-Ed Japan Smooth Streamed

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:06:06 GMT

Tech-Ed Japan 2009 has embraced Smooth Streaming. You can watch the keynote (in Japanese) for a few more days here. Enjoy!