Whether you’re a fan of Team USA swimming or not, you have to admit it was pretty exciting when the men’s 4x100m freestyle relay somehow came from behind to win gold at the 2008 Summer Olympics. Thanks to some exciting new media serving technologies we’ve just announced, you will be able to experience moments like this in high definition, both live and on demand, throughout the 2010 Winter Olympics and other online events.
This week at the National Association of Broadcasters Show, we released IIS Smooth Streaming alongside a beta of IIS Live Smooth Streaming, adding to our canon of IIS Extensions. These are both features of IIS Media Services, which is an integrated HTTP-based media platform for cost-effectively delivering, managing, and caching media.
Instead of the old ‘click and wait’, with IIS Smooth Streaming you get a fast startup time and very little buffering so you can watch your favorite gold medal sport, show, movie, or whatever you want right away. IIS Smooth Streaming automatically and continuously blends the quality of the video to match your available bandwidth and CPU conditions to deliver the best viewing experience.
Media companies can also take advantage of IIS Smooth Streaming features to boost advertising and subscription revenues with uninterrupted delivery, so even if you have to watch commercials, at least you can view them in true high-definition (HD) video (720p+). Hey, somebody has to pay the bills. J
And rather than reinventing the wheel, IIS Smooth Streaming takes advantage of the Web’s existing infrastructure and brings superior performance and scalability to media experiences delivered using plain-old HTTP.
IIS Media Services is comprised of five IIS Extensions:
· Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of on-demand media for Silverlight
· Live Smooth Streaming, live adaptive streaming delivery to Silverlight
· Advanced Logging, rich, real-time client and server side logging
· Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player
· Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content
More information on IIS Media Services and Smooth Streaming can be found at www.iis.net/media, www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming and blogs from the IIS Engineering team.
Eric Rezabek
Senior Product Manager
IIS/Web