David Sayed's Microsoft Blog : silverlight

Streaming Media West

dsayed — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:38:41 GMT

This week, I'm at Streaming Media West in San Jose, California. Seeing the sun, blue skies and relatively warm weather is a pleasant change from the rain swept northwest.
Today is a special pre-conference half-day workshop on Live Broadcasting with Silverlight and Windows Media, which my colleague Chris Knowlton is running. We're videotaping it for posterity and will get it posted as soon as we can.
On Wednesday morning, Marc Whitten, GM of Xbox Live will be delivering the keynote at 9am and on Wednesday afternoon, Steven Woodward from Microsoft and Mike Moser from Vertigo will be delivering a special session on real-world Smooth Streaming using a very recent and timely event as an example.
The exhibition runs Tuesday evening through Thursday afternoon and we'll have a special 20 minute presentation of Smooth Streaming on the show floor on Thursday at 1pm.
If you want to attend the conference or exhibition and don't yet have a pass, you can register at a discounted rate by going to https://secure.infotoday.com/forms/default.aspx?form=smw2009 and using the VIPMSFT as the promo code.

Innovative France 24 Silverlight Player (Updated)

dsayed — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:03:00 GMT

Updated 10/14/2009: Player is now live on the front page of the France 24 website. Changed the link to the new player, which has removed some of the interactive features, no doubt to return later.

France 24, the French 24 hour news channel, has introduced a new Silverlight-based player that also uses Smooth Streaming to deliver an innovative take on live news. You can check out the player and their blog post (in French.)

Here’s the quick summary of the France 24 French blog post:

“Imagine that each spoken word in a video is automatically transcribed and associated with a recorded video sequence. Add to that a program grid, real-time viewer data and vote tallying. Then present all of this in a high definition player that enables you to control the playback and you get the latest prototype presented by France 24 and built in collaboration with the R&D teams at Yacast Media and Microsoft.”

What does this actually let you do? Well a number of really neat things:

Live SD broadcast content at up to 1.3Mbps using Smooth Streaming, so you get the best quality video to suit your bandwidth and CPU (Smooth Streaming isn’t just for HD).
The player timeline is the program grid. Instead of blindly guessing a particular program might start, you actually see the program listings under the timeline. Clicking on the back or forward arrows move the timeline by an hour.
Tags (metadata) of keywords are automatically extracted from the program audio. The tags are shown as a pop-up over the timeline and provide another navigation option.
~~A real-time graph showing the volume of viewers of the stream.~~
~~A real-time bubble chart showing voting – the votes represent users who recommend a particular portion of the program.~~

Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards

dsayed — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:58:41 GMT

We’ve been nominated in three categories for the 2009 Streaming Media Reader’s Choice Awards. There are 22 categories in all and run the gamut from content to technologies. You can enter your votes here. We’ve been nominated in the following categories:

Voting closes on October 16th and the winners will be announced at Streaming Media West in San Jose on November 18th, so if you feel inclined to vote please do so soon.

Obviously, I’m not asking you to vote specifically for us, but if you don’t know about the awards then you can’t vote so I thought I’d at least let everyone know and hope for the best :)

Roll Up! Roll Up! Get Your Smooth Streaming Here!

dsayed — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:48:57 GMT

Want to know more about Smooth Streaming in the real world? Join us on Thursday October 15th at 11am Pacific time for a special live web broadcast hosted by Streaming Media Magazine.

Dan Rayburn of Streaming Media Magazine will moderate the discussion between our very own Chris Knowlton who is a senior program manager in the IIS team at Microsoft, and Jaime Miles who is the head of European Architecture and Engineering for Level 3 Communications in Europe.

The webcast will cover how to deliver HD quality web video over HTTP. Chris will talk about the technology and benefits of Smooth Streaming, and Jaime will give real-world examples of how Level 3 have implemented the technology for recent high-profile live events such as Roland Garros and the UEFA Super Cup.

Head over to StreamingMedia.com to sign-up!

70th Anniversary of The Wizard of Oz

dsayed — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:02:29 GMT

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, Netflix is doing two very special events:

A live “Songs from Oz” concert in Central Park featuring songs from the movie. The concert is being streamed on-demand using Silverlight Smooth Streaming technology.
A special free presentation of the remastered movie itself on Sunday October 3rd for Netflix subscribers and non-subscribers alike, also streamed using Silverlight Smooth Streaming technology.

The events have been made possible through the combination of Netflix, Microsoft, iStreamPlanet and Limelight.

You can find out more about the event by visiting the Netflix Wizard of Oz site.

Canal+ Launches FOOT+ Soccer Channel in Silverlight

dsayed — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:37:47 GMT

Groupe CANAL, the premiere pay television channel in France with 10.6 million subscribers, is adopting Microsoft Silverlight for their FOOT+ online streaming video service. devoted to covering French and European soccer. FOOT+, which is an additional subscription service to Canal+ customers, provides live and on-demand access to French and European soccer including the French Ligue 1, UEFA Champions League and the Europa League. More information can be found here and in the French press release (PDF).

RAI Smooth Streaming

dsayed — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:17:00 GMT

A nice demo of SD content using Smooth Streaming:

http://www.rai.it/dl/RaiTV/hd/raitvhd.html?v=1

DeepZoomPix Coolness

dsayed — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:26:51 GMT

MSN Brazil is using DeepZoomPix on their site show off pictures from the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The DeepZoomPix photo exploration experience engages site visitors, which means they’ll spend longer on the site, which is boon to any site that uses advertising to support its pages. It is also novel enough that visitors are likely to share it with their friends, causing the experience to go viral. Check it out at http://events.br.msn.com/cannes-2009.aspx

CDNetworks Does Smooth Streaming

dsayed — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:39:00 GMT

CDNetworks, a Korea-based CDN has introduced support for Smooth Streaming and it looks great! You can check it out for yourself by visiting http://www.nextsmooth.com.

What’s particularly nice is the demo player shown above. You can see high-quality movie trailers, which have been encoded at seven different bitrates. In the screenshot above you can see how Smooth Streaming steps up the quality level (by selecting a higher bitrate stream) as network and CPU utilization conditions permit. A unique features of the CDNetworks Silverlight player is the “magnifying glass” that you can see above. You can move this around the video and inspect it more closely. You can even adjust the magnification! Finally, take a look at the timeline at the bottom; as you hover over it with your mouse, a still thumbnail of the video at that point (actually I-frame) is shown.

Great work guys – awesome demo app and fantastic use of the technology!

DeepZoomPix: a new way of experiencing photos

dsayed — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:44:00 GMT

Today, we unveiled an exciting technology demo called DeepZoomPix. It enables you to experience a rich way of interacting with large numbers of high resolution photos. The best part is that you can use your own photos either by direct upload, Facebook or Flickr link, or an image RSS feed.

The reason we built DeepZoomPix is to showcase a number of technologies and concepts:

Great User Experience	DeepZoomPix provides a different experience for navigating, viewing and exploring photos, which provides the kind of capabilities you wouldn’t normally expect in a web browser. We used Microsoft Silverlight to create this experience.
Design Technologies	Show designers what can be accomplished relatively simply using Silverlight.
Developer Technologies	Show developers the power of Silverlight and the Azure Services Platform.

I’ll blog some more about DeepZoomPix later but for now, why don’t you try it? Go to www.deepzoompix.com. You’ll need a Windows Live ID and Silverlight installed (you’ll be prompted if you don’t have it already installed).

CTV Streams HD Content with Silverlight

dsayed — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:07:00 GMT

CTV, Canada’s largest private broadcaster, has some great high definition content on their HD Beta site. Using Microsoft’s new Smooth Streaming technology, CTV is using Silverlight and Akamai’s CDN to stream high quality content with no stuttering.

Not all of the content is geo-locked. You can check out both Corner Gas and Malawi’s Song from outside Canada.

Broadcast News

dsayed — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:27:00 GMT

Colleagues in the field highlighted a couple of nice broadcast news sites outside the United States using Silverlight. Even better, they aren’t geo-locked so you can have a play with them no matter where you are. And even better if you are French or Italian speaking – they are in your language!

France Télévisions Infos

Video on demand TV news stories from across France. Bitrate is 300kbps.

I’ve highlighted some of the nice features enabled by the custom Silverlight player. Of course, there are the playback controls, but there’s also content rating and the ability to add the content to your playlist or send a link via email. The program guide appears overlaid above the video at the top of the screen. Other clips are shown overlaid at the bottom of the screen. These overlays disappear when you want them to.

Try it out for yourself here.

RAI

RAI in Italy has a large site with some content that is not geo-locked. Go here to see the video wall.

Some of the video on demand content is viewable outside Italy (like Telepredicatori). Below you can see the embedded player with playback controls.

The live 24 hour news channel is available outside Italy. Look for Diretta RAINews24.

Some of the unique features are the remote control in full screen mode, that gives the viewer a TV-like viewing experience.

Other non geo-locked assets on the RAI site are some of their virtual channels. These are not live, but they are group similar content together. Look for Primo Piano, Rai Kids, Rai Tween, Sanremo, Rai Music, Fiction, Comici, Millepagine, Science & Technology and Viaggi e Paesi.

How Netflix does encoding

dsayed — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:07:33 GMT

Ever wondered how Netflix encodes their video material for their streaming service? This blog post from their chief product office, Neil Hunt, goes into some considerable detail.

Netflix Brings "Watch Instantly" to Mac Users with Silverlight

dsayed — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 08:23:00 GMT

I love Netflix and I love their Watch Instantly feature, which enabled me to discover and catch up with Heroes, re(discover) classics and watch some admittedly dubious films that I would have never otherwise bothered with. Mostly, I use the feature on my Windows Media Center Edition PC that is plugged into my plasma at home. Netflix' Windows client uses Windows Media DRM to secure their content, but left Mac users out in the cold.

Now, Netflix has a public beta of their Silverlight 2-based player, which works great in both Safari and Firefox on my MacBook Pro (currently running MacOS 10.5.5) It works in Windows too of course, and once you opt-in to the public beta you opt-in to the Silverlight experience for both platforms.

Below are some screen captures for your enjoyment. Video quality is on par with the Windows version, though I've not tried plugging the Mac into the plasma for the full screen experience yet.

What is particularly useful is the scrubbing view, which is activated when you click and drag the playhead across the timeline. You get the current play position in the centre of the screen and smaller thumbnails of neighbouring frames to its left and right. The longer the material, the more frames you see (TV shows tend to show one frame on each side of the current position, movies tend to show two frames on each side).

Close up of scrubbing view

Normal playback view (click to enlarge)

Scrubbing view (click to enlarge)

Loading stage (click to enlarge)

Video quality check (click to enlarge)

Acquiring DRM license (click to enlarge)

Silverlight Galleries in Expression Media 2

dsayed — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:50:07 GMT

Expression Media 2 features support for creating Silverlight web galleries, which means interactive galleries rather than plain, boring, static HTML, which after all is so 1999. Apart from being animated, fluid and cool, Silverlight galleries are useful too since they make the gallery experience more like a real application rather than a website.

My colleague Felix created this feature and will be writing up how to edit a Silverlight gallery template using Expression Blend. For now though, he's posted a sample Silverlight gallery in the Expression Media forum.