Vishal Sood : Windows Media Services

Mix 08 Keynote - Media initiatives

vsood — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:08:00 GMT

During today's keynote, Scott Guthrie discussed web, media, RIA and mobile. He announced the release of Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 too. He specifically talked about how Silverlight 2.0 helps improve HD user experience, improve TCO and offers monetization opportunities for media. This is big step that helps our customers to enable their users have a better experience on their sites

Better user Experience
In this space Scott announced an adaptive streaming capability for Silverlight. This can work with any adaptive streaming algorithm. Also announced was a strategic partnership with Move networks. Move networks is big in the adaptive streaming space and their adaptive streaming functionality will be integrated into the Silverlight client. Currently, they use their own client.

Lower TCO
Streaming - Here Scott announced Windows Media Services 2008 (WMS 2008) and how it has 2x improved scalability over previous verison and 3x over others. The moment of pride for WMS was when Scott mentioned how WMS scalability played a crucial role in NBC deciding to go with Microsoft and Silverlight for delivering Olympics online. This is so important as it is clearly a manifestation of customers confidence in WMS. So why don't you give it a try and as Scott mentioned it is free of cost download from Microsoft.com. (In the video link below please seek to 00:58:20 to see Scott talking about WMS)

Here is a screenshot from the keynote:

Progressive Download - Scott mentioned how you have a need to control bandwidth in progressive download scenarios and how IIS Media Pack - Bit Rate Throttling (BRT) helps you achieve the goal without compromising user experience. BRT supports most known media formats out of the box. It is really simple to install please try and explore this on your IIS server. Please don't pay extra on your server when you can save money by saving bandwidth. (In the video link below please seek to 00:59:00 to see Scott talking about BRT).

Here is a screenshot from the keynote:

Monetization
There were several initiatives that were talked about in this space. This included:- Silverlight Ad template for Visual Studio 2008, Using Expression Blend to add design attributes to Ad and Video, Video.Show, Atlas Ad-Manager, Web Playlists and overlay Adverts. John Harris did amazing demos for all of these. Additionally, Double click VP Ari Paparo came out and demoed Double click SDK support for In-stream Ads in Silverlight. This was a cool demo so please see the video. Double click SDK support will be available in Q2 2008. Last and certainly not the least NBC Olympics team came out and gave a sneak peek at the planned NBC Olympics site. This is freaking amazing. You must have never seen a media offering so grand. There is 2200 hours of live video planned to be offered over 17 days. This will also be available for on-demand viewing later. PIP, 4 simultaneous screens, rewind are some of the cool aspects of the new site. (Seek to 01:01:20 in the video to learn more about monetization initiatives)

Web Playlists - John Harris, showed how you can have a pre-roll in stream ad using IIS Media Pack - Web Playlists. He demoed how easy it is to disable/ enable seek using this functionality. He also showed the management console for web playlists as a part of the demo. There are break out session that cover web playlists is more details. As I mentioned in my blog earlier Web Playlists CTP1 went live last week. (Seek to 01:08:00 in the video to learn more about web playlists)

Key Note Video - http://visitmix.com/blogs/Joshua/Day-1-Keynote/

You can download the following anytime on IIS.net
IIS Media Pack - Bit Rate Throttling Go Live

IIS Media Pack - Web Playlists CTP1

Windows Media Services 2008

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9ccf6312-723b-4577-be58-7caab2e1c5b7&DisplayLang=en

Windows Media Services 2008 RC1 for Windows Server 2008 RC1 is now live

vsood — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:09:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that Windows Media Services (WMS) 2008 RC1 is now live. This version of WMS will install only on Windows Server 2008 RC1 version. In addition to Cache Proxy Plug-in and Sever Core installation option, Windows Media Services RC1 is supported on English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish languages for Windows Server 2008 RC1.

Windows Media Services 2008 lowers the TCO with advanced features like Cache /Proxy now available on Standard / Web SKUs. Please refer to the updated feature support table here

Here are some other useful resources:

If you have any feedback/questions, please let us known on the newsgroups or comment on this post

Windows Media Services 2008 RC0 is now live

vsood — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:17:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that Windows Media Services (WMS) 2008 RC0 is now live. This version of WMS will install only on Windows Server 2008 RC0 version. Windows Media Services for Windows Server 2008 boasts of a Cache Proxy Plug-in and support for the Server Core installation option.

In addition WMS now supports some advanced features on Standard / Web SKUs. Please refer to the updated feature support table here

Here are some other useful resources:

If you have any feedback/questions, please let us known on the newsgroups.

Server Side Playlists - Wall Clock Feature and Tech Ready

vsood — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 05:36:00 GMT

I was participating in the Ask the Experts (ATE) session for Tech Ready last week and it just showed me how bad we have been at marketing some of our powerful features. Tech Ready is an internal conference for Microsoft employees where employees in the field are given a preview of the all the technologies coming and they are armored to be able to answer customer questions

Here are two questions I got for Windows Media Services:-

When are you guys going to build a web part to manage a Windows Media Server?

This one is easy, we already have a web based management tool called the ASP Admin or Web Admin. This provides all the functionality available through the rich client but using ASP pages for the same. It has the ability to manage a remote server as well.

A customer of mine wants to be able to program channels broadcast through a Windows Media Server. They want to be able to control what program plays at 9PM and then what plays at 10 PM and so on.

This one thing continues to baffle me. Why did we not yell out and tell the world about Server Side Play Lists (SSPL). Yes, SSPL enables anyone to do the above and a load of other powerful things. Some of them have been covered in my previous post and a lot more will be covered in my subsequent posts. I will do my bit to tell you all reading this blog on why I am so excited about SSPL.

To answer the above question - SSPL allows you to control what time a particular entry starts playing. This time is the actual server time and not a relative time. I mean if you say 9PM, the content will start playing at 9PM according to the sever system time. We call this feature wall-clock feature. The wallclock value can be used in the begin and end attributes to start and stop media according to a real-time clock.

Here is an example SSPL:

<smil>
   <excl>
      <priorityClass peers="Pause">
         <media id="Prog1" src="Prog1.wmv" mce_src="Prog1.wmv" begin="wallclock( 2005-07-28T15:30-08:00 )"/>
         <media id="News" src="http://WMEncoder02:8070" mce_src="http://WMEncoder02:8070" begin="wallclock( 15:59:50 )" end="wallclock( 16:30:00 )" />
      </priorityClass>
   </excl>
</smil>

This is well documented on MSDN as well. Please refer the online documentation for more details.

Note: A server side playlist cannot have only elements pertaining to future. There should be atleast one element that can be active the moment the publishing point is started. This could be a jpeg (looping), an ad or some other piece of content. There can be wallclock'ed media elements in addition to the non-wallclock'ed content and they can be used with PriorityClass to interrupt(pause, etc.) the playing content and play instead.

Server Side Playlists - Part 1

vsood — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 18:34:00 GMT

During my chat with several people using Windows Media Services, I realized that very few actually know about Server Side playlists. I will be focusing on this subject over the next few posts and try to de-mystify it a little.

Definition: Server-side playlist is a list that identifies what content is played for a client, the time at which it is played, and the order in which it is played. The server-side playlist for a Windows Media server is an XML document.

The way this is different from a regular playlist is that this is configured on the server and client has very little control over it. The client is unable to make out that the stream coming to it from a server is actually from multiple digital media files. Instead, client just sees a single stream coming to it.

Now, this is a very powerful tool for the following reasons:

As the client just sees a single stream it does not have the ability to change the order of the files and the content has to be consumed in a particular order only.
As multiple content is streamed as a single stream, client does not have to connect multiple times and thus saving precious bandwidth
This is a great tool to to insert advertisements. You can wrap content requested by the client with additional advertisements that must be viewed whenever a client connects to a broadcast.
You can use the server object (to be covered in subsequent posts) to specify dynamically what media files to stream. In other words, you can edit the playlist even while a client is viewing a stream identified by the playlist. This is an extremely useful feature that could be used to dynamically pick relevant content for the client.
Even though the client sees a single stream, you can send more information about the digital media file being streamed by using the playlist attributes (to be covered in subsequent posts)

In subsequent posts I will give scenarios which are very common and where server side playlists could help. I will also cover the server object and talk more on dynamic content programming using server-side playlists.