NAB Show 2010 – it was fabulous

logo_NABJPEG_BW I just came back from Las Vegas yesterday after attending the NAB Show. It was my first NAB Show and it was a fabulous experience. If you have never attended a NAB show and you are related to broadcasting space or even online media space, I strongly recommend attending it next year to get an understanding of sheer size of the show and the potential.

My purpose for attending this show was to network with participants, evangelize IIS Smooth Streaming and look for partnership opportunities. I think the show met the purpose on all three fronts. Thank you all those who visited our booth and gave us a chance to provide details on the cool technology pieces we are building at Microsoft. Here is the complete Microsoft press release from NAB.

While we had a lot going on at the booth, here are things we were demoing at our stations directly:

  • IIS Smooth Streaming Client and Silverlight Media Framework (SMF) – showcased demos with Multiple audio languages and subtitles using SMF and the demos worked flawless. We demoed how you could build a player with less than 10 lines of code using SMF.
  • IIS Smooth Streaming in 3D – this demo was a crowd puller. It may be the colored 3D glasses but people loved watching 3D content in a browser and the same content was also demoed on a TV connected to a set top box running Silverlight. This demo was done working very closely with Level 3. More details here.
  • Rough Cut Editor tool – this is another super cool tool. You can create a new source by combing portions of multiple individual sources (including live sources) in a matter of a few minutes. The tool is really easy to use and super useful in creating highlights.
  • Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework (MSAF) and visualizations of data using Pivot / Azure (Silverlytics) – SAF already integrates top analytics providers and enables easy analytics integration for Silverlight applications including the ones that use IIS Smooth Streaming. The folks at Location 3 Media used MSAF and Microsoft Pivot to create some super cool visualizations for real-time analytics data.
  • Silverlight Enhanced Movie Framework – this framework allows for rich Blu-ray like experiences with offline Silverlight apps. The demos included the movie “The Hangover” among others at the booth.
  • IIS Smooth Streaming for iPhone / iPad - at the booth we demoed live IIS Smooth Streaming to an iPhone and iPad. The same stream was also consumed in Silverlight at the same time.
  • IIS Smooth Streaming for Windows Phone 7
  • IIS Smooth Streaming for Nokia S60 devices
  • Expression Encoder 4 (EE4) – the demo here was encoding and delivering HD content using IIS Smooth Streaming and EE4 running on the same machine. EE4 is going to be a great tool when it ships. All you enthusiasts should watch out for the release.

Here are some screenshots from the demos:

As you can guess from a really strong lineup above we had an emphatic response at the booth. Customers/ Partners were always at our booth and showed appreciation for the technology. We had a good mix of visitors from large corporations to small startup shops.

At Microsoft we really value our partners so there were some really cool partner demos at our booth from Kaltura, Extend Media, THX, Level 3 and many more. I will try to cover them in subsequent blog posts. Trust me if you weren’t there, you would love to know more about them and if you were there, you must have surely loved them. Let me know your thoughts on NAB and demos through comments. Looking forward to hear from you.

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