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

As such, it's an outgrowth of a major change in Microsoft's strategy and corporate culture, says Sean Alexander, director, video platform, Microsoft's Servers and Tools Division. "Rather than a have a single organization (within Microsoft) thinking about digital media, the entire company needed to think about it," he says, "much in the same way that ten years ago the entire company needed to start thinking about the internet." That Silverlight is coming out of the company's Servers and Tools Division suggests the degree to which hardware may play a role in the technology's future.

The Consumer Experience
When users visit a website with Silverlight content, they'll be prompted to install the plug-in; after three clicks the web page will "light up" with Silverlight, Alexander says. Because it's not a destination application like Windows Media Player, viewers will see content-whether it's standard-definition video, widescreen HD video, animation, or any of the other supported mediums-within the browser, including on devices running Windows Mobile. All of this, including 720p HD, will be displayed at NAB, Alexander says.

"When you offer media, you want to offer it consistently and cross-platform," Alexander says. "You should also deliver them regardless of browser, using web standards like Ajax for programmability."

Microsoft Silverlight Widescreen HD Player

If this sounds a little bit familiar, it might be because Silverlight is the outgrowth of Windows Presentation Foundation/Anywhere, which was announced in late 2006. "One of the reasons the code name was that bad was that we wanted to fly under the radar," Alexander says, noting that the intentionally clunky moniker was designed to appeal only to the developer community and not so much to publishers and consumers.

What's in it for Publishers and Advertisers?
Just because Microsoft was flying under the rader doesn’t mean they weren’t working behind the scenes to establish partnerships; partners announced today range from CDNs (Akamai, Limelight Networks, NaviSite, SyncCast), content aggregators and publishers (Brightcove, Major League Baseball, Netflix), and hardware and software vendors (Sonic Solutions, Tarari, Telestream, Winnov). (More on the hardware connection later.)

Alexander says that, in addition to a "richer, more compelling, more interactive user experience," Silverlight offers publishers "all the benefits of Windows Media," especially Windows Media streaming servers. In fact, at least at this time, Microsoft is really pushing the scalability and efficiency it claims it can offer for delivering content via pure streaming, though progressive downloads from web servers are also supported. "People sometimes only watch 20 seconds of a clip, but they end up downloading the whole thing (with progressive downloads)," Alexander says. "That’s not very efficient in terms of user experience and bandwidth usage." Alexander also reiterated one of the benefits of pure streaming: "Users should be able to go to whatever part in the video they want to watch without having to wait for the entire thing to download."

And, since so much content is already encoded in Windows Media Video (Microsoft’s version of the SMPTE VC-1 standard)—including the vast majority of archived broadcast content—Alexander says that delivering that content via Silverlight has the advantage of being backwards compatible with any publishers and content delivery networks that are already delivering Windows Media.