Sam Zhang's Blog

Last month, Microsoft announced the new TV platform for XBox and a long list of content providers that will be bringing their TV and premium content onto XBox. For more detailed information, please check the press release here and here.

Here are a few links to smooth streaming case studies based on some real world solutions that we helped build over the years. Hopefully you would find them interesting:

Today there are a few popular HTTP adaptive streaming solutions in the industry including Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming and Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). One important difference among these solutions is the file format that’s being used. More specifically, both Microsoft Smooth Streaming and Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming use Fragmented MP4 file format while Apple HLS uses MPEG2-TS.

In IIS Media Services 4.0, we introduced the file write-through behavior with Live Smooth Streaming when doing DVR/Archiving from the publishing point. What does file write-through mean? Here is a bit of background:

This is another blog post that has been long due. I’ve written a lot about Live Smooth Streaming in my past blog posts but so far very few on On-Demand Smooth Streaming. Well, partially because getting On-Demand Smooth Streaming to work is quite simple. You just need to copy your content to the server and then everything should just work. For low volume usage, that’s pretty much all you need to care about. But if you are doing serious production systems with a large content library and significant client traffic, you would want to tune the system to its best performance in which case this blog post should be helpful to you.

We just released IIS Media Services 4.1 that adds support for REST services API's for management of publishing points as well as performance improvements for both on demand and live scenarios. Read more from here.

Yes, the news is out and we can finally talk about it! Our IIS Smooth Streaming platform, together with Microsoft PlayReady DRM technology, is being deployed for Comcast’s Xfinity online service. We’re very excited about this opportunity and the statement below says it all:

This question was asked quite a few times from our customers and on the media forum. The scenario is that I, as an site administrator, want to authenticate encoder streams that are pushing in for live smooth streaming. However, I don’t really want all the smooth streaming players having to do the same authentication. This is definitely a valid and reasonable scenario. An analogy is that I want to authenticate users who want to upload content to my web site without the need to authenticate the browsers.