Category Archive

It was a great week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas this year.  It’s always fantastic to run into the extended family of friends, partners, and customers from around the world.  We had a lot of great new technology announcements and demonstrations this year and too many partner announcements to cover in a quick blog post, but here is a recap of the highlights.

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.  In addition the latest version of the SMF player now supports Timed Text Markup language (TTML) for displaying captions and subtitles.  We now support “textstream” tracks that work similar to the fragmented MP4 video and audio, but contain caption text in TTML format.  We also demonstrated multi-language audio support.  You can now seamlessly switch between audio tracks in the player.   We also announced several new encoding partners that are adopting the Smooth Streaming Format SDK, and several partners who have integrated TTML caption conversion from 608/708 and Teletext, multi-language audio, and ad-insertion using SCTE-35 signaling via sparse stream events.

The Smooth Streaming Format SDK Beta 1 is available as of early March this year, and we will be shipping Beta 2 at the end of May which includes additional support for multi-language audio, Text Streams, and H264 PlayReady sub-sample encryption (per the PIFF 1.1 specification).

 

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. Alex Zambelli, who put this demo together, has more details here.

The Silverlight Rough Cut Editor tool – I’ve talked about this project in the past. This was originally a project that I started on the IMM team for use as a web part in SharePoint. Since the IMM project was closed down, we have kept revising this tool and used it in many Live events including the Winter Olympics. Now the RCE code is available for you to download from the Code Gallery site on MSDN. You can create a new source by combing portions of multiple individual sources (including live Smooth Streaming sources) in a matter of a few minutes. The tool is really easy to use and super useful in creating highlights. It’s also easy to customize and extend since it is based on the PRISM framework. You can integrate the tool easily into your own MAM and DAM or custom database systems to create an end-to-end workflow.

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. This will be the future of movie delivery for me. I don’t even own a Blu-ray player because I prefer not to collect plastic landfill discs! 

 

At the booth we demoed live IIS Smooth Streaming to an iPhone and iPad. The streams were generated by Expression Encoder 4.0 that was sending 10 different bitrates to multiple clients.  This new feature allows you to enable on-the-fly transmuxing at the IIS Media Services publishing point. All you need to do is send the usual Smooth Streaming fragmented-MP4 streams to the publishing point in H.264/AAC at the right profiles and we will re-wrap to MPEG2 Transport Stream and segment the video on the fly.   The same streams can also be consumed from the publishing point in their fragmented MP4 format using Silverlight on multiple clients, including Mac, Windows, Linux, Windows Phone 7, Nokia S60, and the Broadcom and Intel set-top boxes.   This feature is going to be included in IIS Media Services 4.0 Beta 1 in June. 

 

IIS Smooth Streaming for Windows Phone 7 – using the exact same streams that we are sending to the iPad we are able to deliver to Windows Phone 7, which is now running Silverlight and a version of the Smooth Streaming Media Element. The Windows Phone 7 is capable of decoding H264 and AAC at even higher profile settings than Apple’s IPad recommendations, and we should see some even higher quality presets coming soon for Expression Encoder 4.0.

IIS Smooth Streaming for Nokia S60 devices

Expression Encoder 4 (EE4) – we demoed 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.  It now has support for Live Smooth Streaming!  We had a 24 core Intel server streaming 10 bitrates of Live Smooth Streaming (from 6Mb down to 200kbps) along with a second instance of EE4 running with 3 streams targeted at the IPad profile settings. Fantastic!

In addition to all of this great news, we announced that Silverlight adoption has reached 60% globally, on Tuesday just down the street from the NAB convention we launched Visual Studio 2010, and on Thursday we launched Silverlight 4.0.

Here is the full Microsoft press release for more details.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at IBC in Amsterdam at the end of the Summer with a lot more cool demos!  We have some fantastic stuff in the works.