IIS Smooth Streaming - Akamai AdaptiveEdge Streaming

PDC isn’t the only conference in LA this week also taking place is Digital Hollywood (yes that is their website!).

This morning in the US at Digital Hollywood Microsoft introduced “IIS Smooth Streaming”, an extension of IIS Media Pack for up to HD-quality adaptive streaming video delivery.

Initially this will be released as Akamai AdaptiveEdge Streaming for Microsoft Silverlight read more about this at http://www.akamai.com/smoothhd

You can try it out now for yourself by visting the "Proof of Concept" portal http://smoothhd.com but I warn you depending on which ISP you connect through in New Zealand your experience may vary!

New Zealand has an interesting peering ecosystem and although this system works flawlessly on my work connection it struggles on my home broadband connection.

This is caused by the point that Akamai has New Zealand based servers with only two of the large ISP's who leverage them exclusively for their customers.

Please let me know in the comments if you are connecting by a New Zealand based ISP and what sort of experience you are getting with the demo site?

In addition to the smooth streaming, we and others have joined with Akamai to build a best practices approach to online video player development I recommend that you download and take a look at the Silverlight 2 source code for the Open Video Player project.

Read the official press release Microsoft and Akamai Innovate on Consumer Video Experiences Using Silverlight

"The service is expected to be available to select Akamai customers in a beta release in early 2009. Akamai AdaptiveEdge Streaming for Silverlight will leverage IIS Smooth Streaming, which offers a simple-to-manage approach for adaptive streaming, and will be an upcoming feature of IIS7 Media Pack"

The timeline on media announcements and releases to date -

March 5th 2008 – Scott Guthrie announced:

1) “adaptive streaming” support in Silverlight 2

2) A strategic partnership with MOVE Networks.

3) DoubleClick In-Stream product for Silverlight 2

March 15th 2008 – IIS7 Bit Rate Throttling is released

April 17th 2008 - Silverlight DRM, Powered by Microsoft PlayReady is announced.

June 6th 2008 – Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is released

August 6th 2008 – Double Click announces the launch of DoubleClick In-Stream support for Microsoft's Silverlight 2 player framework as part of the NBC Olympic site.

August 7th 2008 - NBCOlympics.com on MSN went live with more than 3,500 hours of live and on-demand video. Leveraging adaptive streaming for on-demand video, DART for Silverlight 2 for advertising and Silverlight 2 Beta 2 as a player.

(The Silverlight player work and IIS7 Smooth Streaming heuristics (stream switching logic) represent Microsoft’s productisation of the work done for NBCOlympics.com.)

August 26th 2008 -

1) Announcement that Microsoft has taken an equity stake in Move Networks that builds on a strategic partnership announced in March of 2008.

2)  The first demonstration of collaboration between MOVE and Silverlight 2 was shown as the Democratic National Committee delivered live HD video from its 2008 convention in Denver via http://demconvention.com/.

This site used Silverlight 2 for the player and MOVE’s own plug-in to support the VP7 codec. MOVE are evaluating Silverlight's codec options (VC-1 and H.264) for potential future versions.

September 11th 2008 – IIS7 URL Rewrite Module - Go Live release

September 12th 2008 – IIS7 Web Playlists Release Candidate (RC) Released

September 16th 2008 - International Broadcasting Conference 2008 in Amsterdam

1) Demonstration of H.264 video and AAC playback in Silverlight

September 23rd 2008 - Microsoft Announced Expression Encoder 2 SP1

October 14th 2008 – Silverlight 2 and Blend 2 SP1 are Released

October 27th 2008 - Netflix has just announced Silverlight 2 will power their streaming video service, which had been Windows-only until now. Silverlight 2 adds support for PlayReady DRM. The service will be available on Xbox 360 as well.

October 28th 2008 - IIS Smooth Streaming is announced and demonstrated.

UPDATE October 30th 2008 - Expression Encoder 2 SP1 is released

Other useful links

Silverlight Media Overview

Welly start-up uses Silverlight to capture TV content