First Smooth Streaming User-Generated Content

So, this is irrationally exciting for me; what's perhaps the first UGC (user-generated content) in Smooth Streaming. Two of our awesome evangelists, Tim Heuer and Arturo Toldeo were in New Zealand for WEB09. They were invited to do a code-off with three Adobe representatives to build a cool app to raffle off the event prizes. Needless to say, they scored an overwhelming victory, even outnumbered 3:2. One would expect no less; no real news there.

What I'm jazzed about is that our local NZ web whiz Nigel Parker went and posted a Smooth Streaming video of the darn thing! And none of us Redmond-based video nerd knew about it until it had been live for a couple of days! We on the video side had been talking about how to jumpstart Smooth Streaming UGC, and here these guys go ahead and just do it.

So, in a foreshadowing of how it'll feel when my kids head off to college, all our work on Silverlight, Expression Encoder, and IIS Smooth Streaming has apparently paid off, and even developer/designer evangelists can now author, encode, and post nicely done Smooth Streaming video, and on a lark.

I must admit this disturbing trend for me personaly, as they're now far better compressionists than I am a developer or designer. I could assuage myself by noting they should have used Denoise, and the player's embeded size isn't calibrated to provide Fast Path playback at the highest resolution. But that's weak tea at best. They did well, without a word of advice from Alex or myself.

I clearly need to go back to our codec PhDs and ask them to add strange options with even more esoteric names; Adaptive Deadzone and DQuant apparently weren't a high enough barrier to entry. Perhaps "Chroma subsampling phase decorrelator?" Too Trek. "motion-vector back-propogation feedback via lookahead for per macroblock differental quantization rate distortion optimization" Hmmm, that actually might work. "Pixel-throoper?" I need the flanger for compression...

Joking aside, a big goal of Silverlight is to expand the reach of our community of developers and designers, and making stuff they can casually use like this is exactly what we are trying to do.

I can't wait to see what they'll do with Silverlight 3 and Expression Encoder 3. We're just getting started.

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