Live Broadcasting for Silverlight and Windows Media Player, Workshop

10:00-13:00
Presenter:
Tony Klenja, Director, Educational Technology & New Media, Daemen College, USA

With broadcasting a live stream to Microsoft clients Mr. Klenja presented what Microsoft got quite a hype about lately. Live video delivery to Silverlight with dynamic rate adaption via HTTP, dubbed Smooth Streaming.

Microsoft pitches HTTP as their new primary delivery method, they delivered a new implementation they called HTTP streaming that is an improved form of HTTP progressive downloading. It packs the video data into smaller segments that look like files to HTTP and can thus be downloaded via standard HTTP delivery. The advantage over classic HTTP progressive downloading is the fact that those segments can be dynamically created, thus also from a live broadcast. This is very similar to what Apple specified as the delivery method to their iPhone before.

The HTTP delivery method has several advantages, it has no problems with firewalls and NATs, needs no expensive media servers (Smooth Streaming works with IIS only though) and it is based on an W3C standard, which could lead to a consolidation on HTTP as a de-facto standard video delivery method. With Adobe following the hype and announcing HTTP delivery for the Flash Platform in 2010, this might not be just complete utopia.

Dynamic rate adaption can switch between different bit rate videos based on the quality of user experience. That allows the video quality to automatically degrade when the network bandwidth is too low or the video is too hard to decode on the device. A technology that has been there long time, but never really seemed to work. Good to see that finally arriving to common use, as it solves a lot of usability issues that online video has today.

Sure enough Silverlight's cross-platform story is not unflawed. Novell's Linux implementation "Moonlight" supposedly supports Smooth Streaming in the Moonlight 2.0 Beta but otherwise Moonlight is based on Silverlight 2.0 and it might be quite difficult to develop Smooth Streaming applications compatible with Windows/Mac and Linux at the same time.
However Microsoft seems to have succeeded in combining the two technology aspects (HTTP delivery and rate adaption) in one working product. And the competition that Microsoft has brought to the RIA market has definitely triggered some innovation. Not least making Adobe to slowly go more open to defend their position.

See a video of the presentation of smooth streaming from Streaming Media East 2009