Alex Zambelli's Silverlight Media Blog

As we leave 2012 behind us and turn our attention to 2013, the time has come for me to share some exciting personal news.

It’s been a busy summer with most of the team focused on Windows Azure Media Services, but I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few other Media Platform releases of the past few months:

I’ve been holding back this post for about two weeks now, wanting to make sure the service got rolled out to all major Windows Azure datacenters first, but here it is now:

“This message has been brought to you by:”

The long awaited 1.0 release of IIS Transform Manager (which for a while there seemed stuck in GMail-like alpha/beta development) finally hit the Web last week! You can download it and read more about its features here: http://www.iis.net/download/transformmanager

This week at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas we made two big announcements:

Smooth Streaming has been a pivotal technology of the Microsoft Media Platform since its introduction in IIS Media Services 2.0 in 2009. And though it’s been commonly associated with Silverlight over the years, those familiar with Smooth Streaming architecture and the Smooth Streaming Media Element probably know that the relationship between Smooth Streaming and Silverlight was never an exclusive one. For starters, the Smooth Streaming Protocol Specification and the Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF) Specification have been public for years. After all, at its heart Smooth Streaming is not much more than a combination of HTTP requests, XML and fMP4 parsing, download heuristics and video/audio decoding. It’s a fairly open, standards-based technology that has very few dependencies on the client platform.

“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain*