We have just released a plug-in for Expression Encoder that makes it child's play to publish videos to your Silverlight Streaming account.

What does this actually mean? The answer depends on what you know:

For people who already know what Silverlight Streaming and Expression Encoder are all about:

• This means that once you've installed the plug in you'll have an option within Expression Encoder that allows you to publish your video straight to your Silverlight Streaming account, so it's ready to stream immediately. Great news! [UPDATE: Scott posted an entry on Liveside.net with some graphics to show how to do this - worth a look]

If you don't know what Silverlight Streaming is, read up at http://streaming.live.com. In essence though, it's free 4GB of storage for your videos and free streaming of them at high bitrate anywhere in the world. And this new plug in makes it really simple to get your videos loaded up to the service.

And if you're not sure what Expression Encoder is all about, there's a great introduction video here that will help you get to grips with it.

Useful links to get you started:

• Get a trial of Expression Encoder from here
• Get the plug in from here
• Get a Silverlight Streaming account from here

One final thing: If you use Windows Live Writer to publish blog posts, there's a nice plug-in for that here that makes it really easy to embed video from your Silverlight Streaming account into your blog

[UPDATE: Angus has posted a great entry on this topic, provides an in-depth walkthrough]