NAB 2007: Major Announcements from Microsoft and Adobe Shake Up the World of Online Video

Finally, the Flash-like capabilities also included in Silverlight mean that content presented in the traditionally nondescript Windows Media Player environment can now be presented in a much more dynamic and interactive way.

What’s Under the Hood?
Silverlight represents a holistic approach to online video, using Expression Media to tie together Expression Blend (formerly Interactive Designer) and Expression Design (formerly Graphic Designer) with Expression Media Encoder, a batch encoding tool that can run on either the desktop or Windows Server. Getting its first demo today at NAB, Expression Media Encoder offers both live and on-demand encoding (from many different formats including AVI and QuickTime into WMV) as part of a single tool. More importantly, Alexander says, the encoder enables template-based publishing in Silverlight, meaning producers can take content and publish it out in, for instance, a "nightly news" template, for both PC and Mac users. When combined with a Tarari hardware-assisted Encoder Accelerator, Expression Media Encoder offers significant encoding speed gains over software-only encoding, Alexander says.

Finally, Microsoft claims that the upcoming Longhorn server offers twice the scalability on the same hardware when compared to Windows Server 2003.

What Does it All Mean?
It’s this beginning-to-end approach to the online video content chain that Rayburn finds most important about the Silverlight initiative. "Microsoft is looking at the entire ecosystem-create, design, encode, host, deliver, monetize, secure, etc.," he says. "Microsoft is looking to win in the long term. They know it took them years to lose their market share in online video and that to do it right, it will take years to win it back."

The Big Picture
Clearly, there’s going to be plenty more detail coming out about both of these announcements in the next few months, especially given that we won’t even see the beta of Adobe Media Player until later this spring. But one thing is absolutely clear: These latest developments mean that the online video landscape is changing radically, in ways that will fundamentally alter the ways that consumers use video on the internet. Adobe’s Mark Randall summed it up best when he compared NAB 2007 to the first NAB he attended in 1982.

"Back then, all the buzz was about cable TV—new networks, new monetization models, questions like ‘What’s the content going to be?’ and ‘Can they sustain a viable business?’," he says. "We’re talking about exactly the same things today; it’s just a different cable, so to speak."