Windows Media Server Beta 3 Available for Download

Thursday, April 26, 2007

A few months ago, the IIS team received the charter of taking Media Serving forward, and merged together with the Windows Media server (WMS) team. This exciting new change at Microsoft was spurred by the fact that Video is becoming one of the most popular types of content on the Web, so what better way to ensure Web serving and Media serving work well together than to bring the engineering teams under one roof?

Bringing the teams together was the first step toward creating a more integrated Web and Video server, and today we're excited to announce the second step. I'm pleased to announce that Windows Media server (WMS) Beta 3 for Longhorn Server is now available for download on the Web. WMS is a very feature rich and popular media server, capable of live and on-demand broadcasting of audio and video. It has many cutting edge features that no other media server can touch, which is one of the reasons it is the most popular media server around - in the enterprise and on the internet.

WMS in Beta 3 adds some important new capabilities, including:

Server Core installation option for Windows Media Services to provide an appliance-like streaming server in Web farms and lights-out locations – new for Beta 3
A built-in Cache/Proxy plug-in to drive tens of thousands of server installations at the edges of private networks – new for Beta 3
Remote Server Administration Tools for managing your Windows Media servers from computers running the Windows Vista operating system – new for Beta 3
2x the scalability of WMS 9.0 in Windows Server 2003 RTM on the same hardware

To ensure we're keeping up with the latest in video serving trends, we decided to remove WMS from Windows Server and instead make it available for download, paving the way for more frequent updates, out-of-band from Windows Server releases. Despite the fact that WMS is now a Web download, it still integrates just as seamlessly with Windows Server as ever, making it easy to manage and use. For more information on how to install WMS, see this KB article. For questions, see the Windows Media Server community forum. Expect to see more around Media Serving and IIS in the future!

Is there any information that speaks to what is new in WMS on Longhorn?

Colin Bowern - Friday, April 27, 2007 9:40:36 AM

Hi Colin - duh, my draft somehow left that out. I've edited my post, and added the new beta 3 capabilities above.

bills - Friday, April 27, 2007 11:38:57 AM

Any traction in expanding the media support? Adobe charges tens of thousands of dollars for Flash streaming services. It would be great to see QuickTime, Real, Flash in addition to Windows Media on the same server. Having to run several streaming servers it expensive.

Colin Bowern - Friday, April 27, 2007 3:49:44 PM

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