I've also seen this, using both IE9 and Chrome, request to smooth.ch9.ms for any videos returns a 503 Service unavailable.
GET http://smooth.ch9.ms/ch9/c162/ff8aa905-66ec-497e-aebb-9eb60127c162/TheXNAshowAnimation.ism/manifest HTTP/1.1 Accept: */* Referer: http://channel9.msdn.com/scripts/Channel9.xap?v=1.5 Accept-Language: en-US Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0) Host: smooth.ch9.ms DNT: 1 Connection: Keep-Alive
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0 Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:24:31 GMT Content-Length: 326 Connection: keep-alive <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Service Unavailable</TITLE> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></HEAD> <BODY><h2>Service Unavailable</h2> <hr><p>HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.</p> </BODY></HTML>
