Tesco, one of the world’s leading retailers, and Microsoft Corp., worldwide leader in software, today announced a collaboration to launch the next generation of home video viewing. The new service, built on Microsoft Silverlight technology, will deliver a similar level of quality as consumers have come to expect from DVD and Blu-ray, but with advanced Web-based interactivity and a viewing experience that goes beyond other digital playback products in the marketplace.

Starting in the autumn, Tesco will allow customers in the U.K. who purchase certain home video titles from Tesco to download “digital copy” versions of movies to their Windows-based or Apple Macintosh computers in a “virtual DVD” experience. The digital copy versions will include a similar level of video quality, interactivity and bonus content available on the physical products. In addition, the digital copy versions will provide consumers with extra network-connected features such as auto-updated trailers, exclusive bonus content, movie viewing parties with online chat, related music offerings such as MP3s and ring tones, and networked games.

But I've got a lot of topics in the queue I hope to get posted before IBC (and yes, I'll be in Amsterdam for the whole show).

First up, the very cool Project Tuva, a Silverlight presentation of the seven classic Messenger Lectures by famed physicist Richard Feynman Microsoft Research and Stimulant. It’s named after the small Central Asian republic of the Russian Federation to which Feynman had a long yearning to travel. Project Tuva was sponsored by Microsoft’s Tony Hey, Rick Rashid, and Bill Gates.

As I've mentioned before, I've been in this digital media game for quite a while now. And since long before we had visions of HD web video, or even DVD, multimedia education has been one of the big goals for the technology.

My school years spanned the filmstrip/16mm projector and early VHS eras. And while an in-class movie was always a treat, the linear nature of the experience could be frustrating. The really interesting parts didn't last longer than the dull parts, and there wasn't any good way to ask a question or dive deeper. And with a dull part, I could easily tune out thinking about Space: 1999 and never come back. The classic lecture format has the same problem, although the teacher could at least read body language of the class to get a sense of where to focus.

So even back in the protean CD-ROM and even laserdisc eras of multimedia, there were many efforts to add interactivity to linear video educational content. The goal was greater engagement, with students able to skim, review, and dive deep when and where something grabs them.

But while we've had a lot of great examples of the genre, the cost of creating all that rich interactive content was a real barrier to making it part of everyday education.

But the combination of the web (lots of existing content ready to be accessed) Silverlight (nice portable runtime to deliver rich experiences), and Expression Studio (highly efficient authoring), we're able to do bigger, deeper projects with a lower authoring cost than ever before.

So, check out the Project Tuva player. The content itself was quite compelling even on celluloid, but they've really done some great things leveraging Silverlight and the web. And it was a delightful surprise; I hadn’t even heard it was in progress before launched.

Let me take a tour through some of my favorite features (going roughly counterclockwise from the top):

Context sensitive extras The right-hand side shows available extras, supplementary information about what's currently being discussed. Clicking on one pauses the video (important!) and takes the user to a graphic, web page, or embedded Silverlight app like World Wide Telescope Silverlight-based web client preview. When they're done, video playback starts right where it left off.
Search Typing into the search box yields a list of the matches in any of the seven videos. Clicking on any particular video shows all matches and their context in the video.
Smooth Streaming And it uses Smooth Streaming for delivery, of course, up to 2.4 Mbps. At the top rates it does a good job of retaining that crazy old-school-movie-on-16mm texture. I haven’t got my hands on the source yet, but I’d be curious to see if HD could be extracted with some high-quality preprocessing.
Transcript All lectures have full transcripts, and automatically show the current line as a caption below the video window. A full transcript mode is also available, and can be used for navigation; just click on a line to immediately switch to playing back the video there.
Timeline The timeline has some great user interface felicities. A quick click started playback at the start of the chapter. But holding down the mouse button a moment or grabbing-and-dragging the playhead allows scrubbing within a chapter. If the timeline view is expanded, the location and type of all the extras are shown, as are the location of user created notes (described below).
Notes The user can add time synched notes that are saved on the local machine. This allows students to bookmark places for followup, or educators to set up a queue of particular topics for classrom use.
Simple Player Or someone who wants to just watch the video can leave everything minimized to cut back on visual distraction. The full-screen mode is cleaner yet. Compare the interface with all the interactive elements minimized and maximized.

Learn how to deliver web video with the quality and reliability of HDTV.  Dramatically increase viewing times and repeat visits using this scalable online video delivery technology.

 

Standard video on the Web is plagued by 2 major issues: the quality of the video (either too small or too blurry) and the reliability of the playback (constant rebuffering or stuttering). These two variables are interrelated: increasing the quality requires higher bandwidth, and using less bandwidth to minimize rebuffering sacrifices video quality.

 

Smooth Streaming solves these issues by dynamically modifying the bandwidth of the video stream based on available bandwidth and individual PC performance. This process is invisible to viewers; they just connect to the live event. If bandwidth drops, the video seamlessly transitions to the next lower stream. When the bandwidth recovers, the stream will automatically use the higher bandwidth. This enables the viewer to watch the live event in the best possible quality at all times, without pauses or interruptions in the video stream.

During this webcast, you will learn about Smooth Streaming from two industry experts, who will teach you:

• What Smooth Streaming is and why it is the future of online video delivery
• How Smooth Streaming delivers HDTV-quality experiences
• How it has been successfully implemented for major live events
• How to start delivering your content with Smooth Streaming

When we first started talking about streaming The Championships, Wimbledon, we were definitely excited, but knew it was going to take a village to make it possible. After agreeing to work with NBC Sports back in April of this year, we had only two weeks to figure out not only if we could pull it off in time, but who we needed in order to do so. Given that we only had eight weeks until The Championships started, you can only imagine how fast we had to put the pedal to the metal.

We already had a solid foundation to start from, with the successful broadcast of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on NBCOlympics.com, and Live at Wimbledon presented an opportunity to begin to take advantage of the features of Silverlight 3 as we prepare for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics Games.

We also chose iStreamPlanet to not only encode all of the media content, but called upon their design prowess as well to create and deploy a custom Microsoft Silverlight-based media experience, which will leverage the latest Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7) Smooth Streaming technology. Additionally, iStreamPlanet’s digital asset management product, iStream Director will manage all the file-based transcoding for match replays and highlights.

So what does this all mean exactly? Well, some pretty cool features and functionalities all at the tips of your fingers, including (but certainly not limited to):

• Live HD Smooth Streaming
• Video-On-Demand HD and SD Smooth Streaming (which will be used for highlights and match replays)
• Integrated Advertising
• Instant Replay (in case you want to see Roger Federer’s forehand one more time), and
• Deep-linking via RSS feed (which provides the ability to link to the media player from external sources and invoke playback of the desired media clip you’d like to watch).

And when we said this kind of project takes a village, we meant it. In addition to iStreamPlanet, we also had to call upon content delivery network (CDN) partner Akamai to provide the media delivery, Inlet Technologies to provide the encoding technology, NBC’s partner IMG who is managing the event logistics at Wimbledon, and their partner Perform Group, who is handling the encoding of the 4 WMV court feeds and providing archives of the matches.

Here’s the on-demand player:

And the live HD player:

As for the event itself, here’s some more details from Sports Media News about the planned experience:

Live at Wimbledon will offer live streaming of up to four concurrent courts, on-demand replays of the best matches from every day of The Championships, alternate camera angles for NBC Sports semifinal and final match coverage, daily video highlights, and Golden Moments from the Wimbledon archive, including an on-demand replay of the classic 2008 Gentlemen’s Finals between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, that NBC Sports’ John McEnroe said was the “greatest match we’ve ever seen.”

Live at Wimbledon will be available starting today, the first day of The Championships, Wimbledon with on-demand coverage. Live streaming of NBC Sports coverage and additional matches will begin on Saturday, June 27, concluding with the Ladies’ Final on Saturday, July 4 at 9 a.m. ET and the Gentlemen’s Final on Sunday, July 5 at 9 a.m. ET.

The Live at Wimbledon video experience will be powered by Microsoft Silverlight and offers the first implementation of Live Smooth Streaming for U.S.-based audiences. Silverlight and Live Smooth Streaming enable NBC Sports and Live at Wimbledon to deliver true high definition (HD)-quality streaming video for both live NBC Sports broadcast and on-demand coverage. Live at Wimbledon users will also be able to experience digital video recorder (DVR)-like controls, such as the ability to pause live action, skip back to drive their own instant replays, and join live broadcasts mid-event. Microsoft partnered with application service provider iStreamPlanet to build the Live at Wimbledon video player and handle content acquisition, encoding, and origin hosting with Akamai providing the delivery of the content.

“NBC Sports has a proud tradition of Wimbledon coverage, and we are even prouder to extend our coverage online with the all-new Live at Wimbledon,” said Perkins Miller, Senior Vice President, NBC Sports & Olympics, Digital Media. “Tennis fans in the U.S. can now widely follow Wimbledon online both live and on-demand, and the quality of the Live at Wimbledon video player will only enhance their viewing experience.”

“Building on the success of the NBCOlympics.com broadcast of the 2008 Beijing Summer Games, we’re excited to partner with NBC Sports once again to provide Silverlight and the unique capabilities of Live Smooth Streaming to power Live at Wimbledon,” said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft Corp. “Silverlight enables NBC Sports to provide Wimbledon fans true HD-quality video content and DVR-like features, dramatically improving the quality of the online viewing experience over previous years.”

For more information on Live at Wimbledon, tennis fans can go to NBCSports.com or Wimbledon.org. Tennis fans can also follow Live at Wimbledon on twitter.com/NBCWimbledon.

As always with these big sports events, there’s plenty of georestrictions going on. The direct link for the USA is:

http://wimbledonlive.nbcsports.com/

The options per country are listed here:

http://www.wimbledon.org/en_GB/interactive/video/live.html

It’s amazing to think we pulled this together in just two months. It’s a testament to the very hard work of our great teams inside Microsoft and some incredible partners.

On Tuesday, June 22nd at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival 2009, Microsoft announced it will bring Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recognized rich media technologies including Silverlight to Xbox LIVE within the next year.  By extending support to technologies like Silverlight, Xbox LIVE will offer advertisers and creative designers scale and reach with their campaign creative assets, enabling them to build and deliver interactive, interconnected experiences that are unlike anything else on television, and extend these experiences across multiple screens – the TV, the PC, and Mobile.

The topic this time is Live Streaming. Here’s the description:

Online Workshop: Live Streaming

A Streaming Media Roundtable Web Event with the Pros

Whether you're a live video streaming veteran or a newbie looking to present your first online event, this Streaming Media Roundtable offers an opportunity to get guidance from 4 leading companies that specialize in live video delivery. In addition to discussing the various solutions they offer, the presenters will address best practices for coordination, workflow, and user experience as well as do's and don'ts that can help you present better live events and achieve maximum ROI. They'll also answer your questions specific to your unique circumstances, so don't miss this unique online workshop.

And it is a great lineup (with stolen images):

Brian Stevenson
Director, Product Management
Digital Rapids

Tim Harader
Senior Product Manager
Microsoft Silverlight

Neil Sweeney
Senior Vice-President North America
StreamTheWorld

Simon Ball
Vice President and Global Head of Webcasting Operations
Thomson Reuters

Brian Stevenson has been a great partner of ours at Digital Rapids, and played an important role in making NBC Olympics live video stress free and high quality. It’s a rare and wonderful thing to have a big rack of real-time encoders just keep on trucking day after day and and never make it into the list of live event crises.

Tim Harader is a great guy and an old friend, and I’m glad to have an excuse to give him a shout-out. He’s been working behind the scenes for a decade now on all kinds of important digital media products, with a real focus on bringing the best of the professional video industry into PC playback. I first met him setting up the digital projection system at Cinema 21 for the WMVHD theater project, and I was impressed by his passion and competence in getting the best possible experience in that environment. Since joining Microsoft, we’d worked together on HD DVD, the codec team, and now on Silverlight.

Tim was there at the beginning of web video, HD on the PC, HD in the home, and now Smooth Streaming.

So, register already! It’s free. And apparently you can win a GPS.

But a bunch of the rest of the Silverlight media team are there. They’re demoing our big news, but I can at least write about it.

And that news is the Qumu Multicast Plug-in for Silverlight and  Project Starlight, which bring Windows Media multicast support to Silverlight.

• Silverlight Team Blog announcement
• Qumu announcement

What is it?

The Multicast Plug-in for Silverlight is a set of native code browser plugins (ActiveX or NSAPI) developed by Qumu that enable Silverlight to access multicast streams from Windows Media Services. Versions are available for all supported Silverlight browsers on both Mac and Windows.

Why?

Windows Media has long been the leading media platform in the enterprise, and a big part of that has been our support for multicast. Multicast is basically required to do big live corporate events on a LAN/WAN given their network topology. Proxy caching from Smooth Streaming is great for scaling up consumer content delivery, but Enterprises generally don’t have proxy caches inside the WAN. So, to date Silverlight wasn’t a good fit for corporate events.

But Silverlight itself has been very compelling for the enterprise, and they’ve been itching to take the rich presentations they’ve been able to do for on demand and use them for live. And Silverlight can do some great stuff there:

• Multi-camera views for multi-location events
• Synchronized slides and other multimedia assets
• Integrated chat, voting, and other feedback to break out of one-way only communication
• More robust cross-platform embedding for the Mac users in graphics or video departments

Both Microsoft and Qumu have had many, many requests from our corporate, education, and government customers for multicast in Silverlight, and thus the best of both worlds. Qumu developed Starlight with support from Microsoft.

What modifications are needed to support this?

There’s no changes on the server or networking side required – that was a core goal of the project.

The Plug-in is accessed via MediaStreamSource, and so will need some code added there. It’s the same API for all platform/browsers, and the necessary source code is provided as part of Starlight.

The biggest task is to get the components installed on all the machines. It is supported by the standard enterprise deployment tools like WSUS.

How does Starlight get deployed?

It’s a native code browser component, and so will require administrator access to install. This is the biggest work item in most cases. Since multicast is of most interest inside enterprises and other large LAN/WAN configurations, the majority of the machines that would run it are managed desktops. Thus the IT departments for the organization will need add it to their standard build.

What does Starlight cost? What’s the license?

The Starlight binaries are free downloads. Source code is also available under a license compatible with MS-PL, which allows very broad modification and then redistribution of those modifications.

I’m looking forward to see what other partners can do by extending Starlight to enable new content types and scenarios.

When and where can I get it?

The binaries and source code should be available for download at Codeplex in the next few days.

The mono team has tons of info, so here’s a link list.

• Miguel de Icaza has a detailed blog post
• Chris Toshok has some great details as well.
• Moonlight 1.9 Release Notes
• The test sites Moonlight targets, with the status of each
• Silverlight/Moonlight development with the Mac OS X MonoDevelop

They’re hard at work finishing Silverlight 2 support, and have already started adding some Silverlight 3 features, including (from Chris’s link above):

• Easing functions for animations, including user-supplied ones.
• SaveFileDialog, a safe way to allow users to save content from Silverlight applications
• MultiScaleImage (the heart of Deep zoom) API additions (e.g. the AllowDownloading property).
• MediaStreamSource now supports PCM audio data, RGBA and YV12 video data.  This along with other extensions makes it very easy to write codecs entirely in managed code, that you can then distribute with your xap.
• WriteableBitmap is supported.

I’m particularly excited abut the Raw AV support being there, as it opens up a whole world of media format extensibility.

Anyway, great stuff guys! I’m looking forward to a final release and being able to have Moonlight and Silverlight compatibility be something that “just works.”

As my long-time readers my remember, I joined the board of the DVD Association a while back. Since then, we’ve been expanding our mission to encompass all forms of interactive digital media, not just optical disc, and are now the International Digital Media Alliance. We’re trying to fight the good fight in bringing the best parts of DVD and Blu-ray, particularly the high bar for interactivity, to the exploding breadth of media delivery technologies. I’ve got a particular passion for bringing high quality menus, multi-language audio and captions, and interactive extras to the web. I did my first DVD authoring back in 1997 in a very prerelease version of Scenarist running on an SGI O2, at the world’s first DVD training class (this is where we were a year later). Let me tell you, Blend is a whole lot easier to use than that.

If that sounds interesting, we’re always looking for new corporate and personal members. Being being an important and fun organization to be involved in, there’s also a swath of benefits available to members.

The DVDA’s has been running Excellence Awards for many years to recognize our peers in making great DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray titles. This has been quite a big deal among those who make these titles. Here’s some galleries of winners of past years: 2008, 2007, 2006.

The DVD and Blu-ray categories are in full swing. But new this year is new swath of Online/Interactive Excellence Awards for non-disc content. While we’ve seen plenty of PR and advertising touting various services and sites. But I think this are the first major awards focusing on technical excellence for online media.

I’d love to see some submissions for the many great sites and experiences out there.

Here’s the full category list. And, yes, as you could guess, I came up with the 960 wide threshold…

ONLINE/INTERACTIVE EXCELLENCE AWARDS (non-disc awards)

This award division, new for 2009, is for web user experiences, video content produced for Online Streaming or Download, and Audio or Video podcasts. Any online video or audio site, or audio or video podcast is eligible to enter any appropriate category.

The Excellence Award will be presented to the website or podcast whose name appears in the URL,  and/or to the primary producer who can prove they have created the work. Final award recipients will be determined at IDMA judges' sole discretion.

1. Excellence in an Online User Experience

Recognizes excellence in an online service or product, including
design, functionality, ease of use, delivery quality (i.e. stalling, buffering, etc) and overall impact. 

2. Excellence in Advertising Integration

Recognizes excellence in the integration of commercial messages into an online service or product,
including ad implementation, functionality, ease of dismissal, impingement on video content
(i.e. masking, impairment, etc.) and overall impact of the advertising integration.

3. Excellence in Streaming Video quality

Recognizes excellence in the quality of the video in a streaming service or product,
including video quality, video artifacts, audio quality and overall impact of the streaming video.

4. Excellence in Download Video quality

Recognizes excellence in the quality of the video in a downloading service or product,
including video quality, video artifacts, audio quality and overall impact of the downloaded video.

5. Excellence in Audio Podcasting

Recognizes excellence in the quality of an audio podcast experience,  including audio quality,
quality of narration, music score and interstitials, edit and assembly, and overall impact of the podcast.

6. Excellence in SD Video Podcasting (under 960 pixels wide)

Recognizes excellence in the quality of a Standard Definition video podcast experience,  including
quality of video and audio,  narration, music score and interstitials, edit and assembly, and overall impact of the podcast.

7. Excellence in HD Video Podcasting (960 pixels wide and over)

Recognizes excellence in the quality of a High-Definition video podcast experience,  including
quality of video and audio,  narration, music score and interstitials, edit and assembly, and overall impact of the podcast.

So, if you’re working on some great stuff you want to nominate, submit it here.

And there’s one last award that could be of interest:

FACILITY/INDIVIDUAL EXCELLENCE AWARD

This is a “craft” award recognizing excellence in a body of work from a production facility or an individual. Discs, Documents, testimonials and representative titles or other works must be submitted.

Note: The Facility or Individual must be nominated by a third party, not an employee of the facility.

So if you’ve got a facility or go-to person for digital media work, you can nominate them as well. It’s an even better thank you than that holiday cheese-and-sausage basket.

It builds on the SmoothHD and IIS.net demos with a very nice GUI, and an awesome use of some of Silverlight’s RIA style-features. For example, A magnifying glass with user control over magnification level. Which is crazy cool, and actually kind of useful when doing demos.

It also offers manual stream selection so you can simulate the experience at different bitrates.

Anyway, it’s a blast. Give it a spin.

• AT&T
• CD Networks
• Internap
• Level 3
• Limelight

• Digital Rapids
• Envivio (and press release)
• Grab Networks (formerly Anystream)
• Inlet (and press release)
• Rhozet
• Telestream (and press release)
• VBrick
• Viewcast (and press release)
• Winnov

Which is a huge swath of the professional compression tools market.

DRM service provider support
And we've had a bunch of support for Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady from DRM service providers. Since Silverlight encryption is applied during content creation, not during content distribution, using DRM has no real impact on the server side; access to a DRM license server to provide licenses to the Silverlight client is the only big difference from a service perspective.

• BuyDRM (press release)
• Entriq
• ExtendMedia 
• Ipercast

• iStreamPlanet

I haven't had a chance to drop by everyone's booth yet, but will be highlighting some of their demos and cool announcements throughout the week when I find out which of the many projects we've been collaborating on are public now.

Silverlight 3: we're 1080p24
So, we had that whole HD on the web discussion a few weeks ago which spun out into many threads on different forums. A few die-hards said that only 720p60 and 1080p24 should count as full HD, based on the original ATSC definition.

It'll keep on being discussed, but that won't keep anyone from calling Silverlight HD, because we've now got 1080p24 working in Silverlight 3. This represents a huge amount of media playback tuning and testing by the Silverlight team, and it's really paid off. Much of the improvements have been since the public Silverlight 3 beta, so those not at NAB will have to take my word for it for the moment, but we're showing off:

• 1920x1080p24 VC-1 at 6 Mbps
• On a Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz system
• With smooth playback at any size using GPU scaling

And it is glorious.

On the same system we're also showing off H.264 720p24 2.5 Mbps with similarly smooth playback.

While those specs are obviously beyond what many home PCs can do due to screen size or network speed, with Smooth Streaming we can offer that as the highest-end experience while offering further bitrate bands as low as required.

And of course, optimization that enables 1080p on the high end makes 480p work on lower-end machines than Silverlight 2 could support, due to both media pipeline improvemetnts and offloading scaling and compositing to the GPU. The gains on single-core machines are particularly notable; we've got a quite nice Smooth Streaming experience even on NetBooks now.

The public release of Silverlight 3 will be later this year.

New Smooth-Streaming VC-1 implementation
We're working with the encoder tool vendors to integrate a new VC-1 implementation that's specifically tuned for Smooth Streaming. You may recall Expression Encoder's  Smooth Streaming mode uses the VC-1 Encoder SDK in 1-pass CBR mode with a fixed GOP size. While that certainly can produce good video that's Smooth Streaming compliant, in the end that's really the kind of settings used for live broadcasting. With on-demand content, we can do an analysis pass to figure out a variety of better ways to optimize the bitrate. In particular, we can dramatically reduce the incidence of frames compressed to the point where visible blocky artifacts appear.

What it does are awesome in so many ways that it makes my compression nerd soul twinkle with delight. But those details will have to wait for a long and Excel-chart laden blog post of its own.

In the interim, let me offer you a sample encoded in a not-quite-final version of what we're doing here. This is our favorite Big Buck Bunny content, encoded to these specs

• 1080p24 4 Mbps video with a 5 second buffer
• Smooth Streaming compatible VC-1 and WMA 10 Pro
• In a WMV wrapper, so you can play it in WMP

This is what the top end Smooth Streaming bitrate can look like once Silverlight 3 is released later this year. And as mentioned above, we're now doing 6 Mbps on a Core 2 Duo, we've got some further headroom for more challenging content.

Here's the file (hosted by Silverlight Streaming):
http://silverlight.services.live.com/31260/Big%20Buck%20Bunny%201080p24%204%20Mbps%20Smooth%20Streaming/video.wmv

Remember, Windows Media Player can Save As progressive download content without DRM if you want to make a local copy.

If you're here at NAB, Inlet is showing off the new VC-1 implementation as implemented in their Armada product, with a bunch of other output samples. Check it out.

But it shall be, and once again, I shall be there.

Compressionist Party: Tuesday, April 21st, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm

And, as many of you have emailed me to ask about, yes, we’ll be doing the Compressionist Party again. And I’ve finally got (most) of the details figured out. I think this may be the 8th annual incarnation, although I can’t quite remember when my wife and I threw the first of these in our Hilton suite for a few industry friends. People always seem to have a lot of fun.

It’ll be at the Encore Las Vegas (sometimes called the Wynn Encore).

As in past years, we’re scheduling this as a “between events” kind of thing, since there are so many big industry parties every night, so people can drop by between being at the exhibits and later events, or after an early dinner. I’m trying to arrange for some drinks and light snacks, but there won’t be a full spread. And there will be no pounding music.

It’s a casual event without any presentations; just chit-chat and networking between compression nerds. We get a good mix of Microsoft folks, people from tool vendors and service companies, and hands-on digital media folks.

We won’t know the actual suite number until this weekend. So your best bet is to RSVP to me (Ben dot Waggoner at, well, you know the company) with how many you’ve got coming and what times you’ll think you’ll be there, and I’ll email details when we’ve got them. I like to track a ballpark estimate how many folks we’re going to have when so we don’t get the room too full or too dry. Or drop by and see me at the booth, ala:

My booth schedule: 9:00-1:30 Mon-Thur

This is simple. I’ll be at the Microsoft booth every morning of the exhibits (we’re right near the main entrance of South Hall, across from Grass Valley). I’ll be talking about and demoing my usual stuff: Silverlight, compressing for it, Smooth Streaming, etcetera. Come by, ask questions, and see some demos of our great new stuff!

I gave a quick response in the comments that I wanted to expand into a proposed definition.

Resolution and frame rate

The infamous Table 3 of the ATSC specification lists 18 different resolution and frame rate combinations for digital broadcasting, But they drew a pretty clear line on what’s HD and what’s not: 1280x720 is HD, and anything less isn’t.

A more pedantic definition could be that HD should be at least 1920x1080p24 or 1280x720p60. And we’ll get there on the web before too long. But for now, I want the full 720p experience as a minimum bar. I can see two flavors of that which we can define as the ragged low end of web HD; anything below these are something else.

1280x528p24

For film source content, the widest aspect ratio in common use in 2.4:1. With 1280 wide, if we crop to the active image area and then round down to the next divisible-by-16 value for optimum compression, we’re left with 1280x528. For 1.85:1 movies, the equivalent is 1280x688

960x720p30

Lots of production codecs for HD aren’t square pixel. HDCAM is 1440x1080, and DVCPROHD is 1280x1080 or 960x720, even though both formats are always 16:9. So, I’m also inclined to allow 960x720 anamorphic for HD, but only in 30p. DVCPROHD’s 24p mode is 1280x1080p24.

Thusly…

If we calculate the pixels per second of the above, we get:

• 1280x528x24=16,220,160 pixels/sec
• 960x720x30=20,736,000 pixels/sec

So the anamorphic is still more pixels/sec than square pixel 2.4:1. We could arguably define “Web HD” as “at least 16M pixels/second” as well.

Quality

Hassan Wharton-Ali brought up another good point on the thread - HD should actually be HD quality. It can’t be a lousy, over-quantized encode using a suboptimally high resolution just so it can be called HD.

A good test is the video should look worse (due to less detail), not better (due to less artifacts), if encoded at a lower resolution at the same data rate. If reducing your frame size makes the video look better when scaled to the same size, then the frame size is too high!

Samples!

I know these are going to be too wide for my default blogging interface, but I need to stick an iframe somewhere in order to lock down the frame size exactly, due to how Silverlight Streaming works. Autoplay is turned off so your browser doesn’t automatically start two HD clips at once.

NOTE, yes I know in fact they still are doing Autoplay for some reason. I'm trying to fix that right now. Just make sure to pause the one you aren't watching. At least I got the size locked down (although still with too much padding...).

These are WMV files, but encoded with EEv2 SP1 using Smooth Streaming settings (so 1-pass CBR, 2 sec Closed GOP, and all that jazz). These are pretty basic encodes; I didn’t do anything tricky, as we WANT to see some artifacts as we’re defining these as the low bound of HD and below the low bound of HD. I do three versions of each clip

• True HD at 3 Mbps (64 Kbps audio, 2937 Kbps video)
• “Fake” HD at 1 Mbps (32 Kbps audio, 959 Kbps video)
• Good SD (640x360 for 16:9, 640x264 for 2.4:1) at 1 Mbps (48 Kbps audio, 943 Kbps video)

The SD is in there as an anchor to show that a lower resolution can actually look better at lower bitrates. Clearly the SD looks better most of the time, so 1 Mbps doesn’t count as HD. And those 16 Kbps of audio make a real difference with WMA 10 Pro, taking us from 32 to 44.1 KHz.

If you mouse the player, it’ll pop up controls (but without scaling the video – one of the nice features of the Black Glass template). To pick a particular clip, click on the icon that looks like poker chips (although upon reflection I note they’re actually film reels).

The Island: 1280x528p24

I haven’t used this clip in ages, but it’s always great to trot out as an edge case of hard encoding. It’s a Michael Bay joint, full of whip-pans, super-fast editing, frenetic motion, and film grain. Low bitrates can look fine for 80% of the frames in a clip, but fall apart for 20%. This clip has some good sequences where there’s multiple edits a second, so you get lots of chances to see the bandwidth stress. If only we had an encoder that could dynamically adjust frame size based on content complexity…

Lady Washington: 960x720p30

Just a short version of it this time, mainly because I’m tired of slow DSL uploads. The HD sizes are anamorphic, the SD is square pixel.

Silverlight on YouTube

As it’s such a big event, everyone wants in on it. Which has led to what’s the first use of Silverlight on YouTube that I know of. I don’t know why people find this remarkable, but I’ve heard “yeah, but YouTube would never use Silverlight” more the once. So it’s nice to share this screenshot from www.youtube.com/marchmadness.

March Madness Encoding settings

My master compressionist colleague Alex Zambelli and I worked on the March Madness encoding settings and workflow, with him doing all the heavy lifting getting the Inlet Spinnaker encoders configured before the event. He’s included the details in his big Mix news roundup blog post. It’s as worth reading as all his other stuff. I’ll quote the March Madness specific stuff below:

CBS Sports has launched a Silverlight-based March Madness video player that lets you watch all NCAA Basketball Tournament games live. Visit http://mmod.ncaa.com/video to launch the March Madness video player. If you are using Internet Explorer on Windows, the default player will actually be an old-school WMP player, so you’ll need to click on the HQ Player button to launch the new Silverlight player.

The live video for the tournament is being streamed using Windows Media Services. Obviously, we couldn’t use Smooth Streaming because the server technology is still in beta and the encoders aren’t yet commercially available. But CBS did the next best thing! All live streams are available in 4 video quality levels:

Total Bitrate (kbps)	Video Bitrate (kbps)	Audio Bitrate (kbps)	Video Width	Video Height	Pixel Aspect Ratio
1500	1450	48	784	432	1:1
1000	950	48	512	384	4:3
650	615	32	368	272	4:3
350	315	32	240	176	4:3

Video codec used is VC-1 Advanced Profile. Audio codec used is WMA Professional at 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo.

All March Madness games are being encoded by MLB.com’s encoding facilities using Inlet Spinnaker 7000 encoders. The Spinnakers were configured based on my own recommendations in order to provide maximum quality at all bitrates.

The March Madness Silverlight player uses preroll ad download statistics to estimate available client bandwidth and tries to make an appropriate first choice of bitrate level. Of course none of this would be necessary with Smooth Streaming, but we really tried to make the best of the Windows Media Streaming experience anyway. The player also has built-in heuristics to detect quality-of-service issues, such as frequent rebuffering or low frame rate rendering, at which point it can suggest to the user to choose a lower bitrate. Users can manually switch between available bitrates using the “-” and “+” buttons in the button of the player UI.

Note that we used anamorphic encoding for the lower bitrates. Due to the strong bias towards horizontal motion in basketball, that makes for both more efficient compression (as motion blur is concentrated horizontally, and thus there’s more real detail vertically) and for more efficient encoding, as a smaller motion search range can be used more often. The highest bitrate was encoded as square pixel at the exact size of the MediaElement in the player, so that we are able to use every pixel we have access to. That also mean the highest bitrate doesn’t get scaled, which gives us the Fast Path for better performance.

Live Smooth Streaming

Lots is going on at MIX, so as not to overwhelm with too many posts, I’ll try to triple-dip on this one.

First, as part of Scott Guthrie’s keynote yesterday (now with transcript), we announced that live streaming is coming for Smooth Streaming. The key advantages of Smooth Streaming are as applicable to live video as on-demand. And for high volume live events where scalability concerns can force users into “waiting rooms” or a lower tier of service, the offered scalability may be even more important yet. In particular, my personal take on the killer aspects of live streaming are:

Seamless adaptive bandwidth switching

With on-demand content, particular shorter duration, you can let users with slow connections buffer a while and then play.  But live is live; if you’re offering just a 1000 Kbps stream, a user isn’t going to get a decent experience if the the bandwidth available to the player drops to 800 Kbps for more than a couple of seconds. And even someone with a 5 Mbps connection may see that shared between multiple users and computers, and may have multiple bandwidth-consuming apps running at the same time; it’s a lot to ask that the bandwidth NEVER drops below 1000 Kbps for the duration of a long event. Thus, the managed code heuristics module running inside the Silverlight client can continuously measure available CPU speed, bandwidth, and even window size, and then give the user the best content they can use at that moment. And it can seamlessly switch without any pause in the video or “buffering” message to a lower stream if needed or a higher stream if usable.

My hope is that this can break live streaming out of the lowest common denominators used to maximize availability. With Smooth Streaming we can offer fallback rates down to the minimum experience appropriate for the content, and as high a rate as the content justifies, with each user getting the best experience they can get at the moment. I hope this can make consumer HD streaming a reality for a lot of viewers.

SmoothHD.com is a great demo of the seamless stream switching for on-demand; the live experience will be essentially identical.

Leveraging scalability of the web via proxy caching

In Alex Zambelli’s formulation, Smooth Streaming “adapts video to the web, instead of trying to adapt the web to video.” The content is delivered in a series of small files each containing a few seconds of video and audio. And each copy of each chunk has the same URL, so proxy caches handle this automatically. So all the CDNs (like our launch partner Akamai) with great web delivery technology are able to immediately leverage their huge network of proxy edge servers with Smooth Streaming. Moreso, all the ISPs and organizations with proxy servers (and that’s most of them) can have multiple people watching the same content with only a single copy of each chunk having to be sent to the proxy. So those horror stories about a company’s internet connection being brought to its knees by everyone watching the Olympics or March Madness at the same time? We think we’ve done a lot to make that much less of a problem, since the more popular the content, the more scalability it gets through the proxy caching. Hopefully this can make the waiting room a thing of the past.

There’s plenty of additional tuning the CDNs and others can do to further improve caching for Smooth Streaming specifically, but it gets a huge boost automatically by leveraging the existing infrastructure of the web.

Live PVR

Since on-demand Smooth Streaming is delivered as a bunch of small chunks, and live Smooth Streaming is delivered as a bunch of small chunks, we’ve eliminated the hard line between a live broadcast and the on-demand version of it that used to need to be published several hours later. Instead, what’s live is just the latest chunk that’s available, but every chunk is still there (and likely still in the proxy cache). So that means you can pause, rewind, skip to the beginning, skip back to live, all during the live stream. Think of it as a PVR in the cloud.

And it’s already in beta

Better yet, we’ve already got a public beta of it for download! It requires IIS 7.0, running on either Windows Server 2008 or Vista SP1 (you can play with it without installing 2008).

It can be installed via our cool new Web Platform Installer as well as traditional .msi files.

The package also includes a "simulated live encoder" which loops out the bits from a local file to the server just like an encoder would do. This enables server and player development, testing, and configuration without having to actually run a live encoder 24/7.

We also have a new IIS Media Services portal with information about all the IIS media delivery technologies. There’s a nice overview about the platform as well.

Inlet’s Live Smooth Streaming encoder

As part of the announcement, Inlet also announced they’ll be the first to market with 3rd party Smooth Streaming encoding, support on-demand in Armada and (in a live demo!) Live in Spinnaker. We’ve got lots of Windows Media and Silverlight customers using Spinnakers with great satisfaction already, so adding Live Smooth is going to be a great upgrade.

Inlet’s John Bishop is presenting along with IIS’s John Bocharov at MIX as I type this in fact. There should be more details about their encoders, and the on-demand version of the session should be available by tomorrow. Here’s the details for finding it in the archives easier.

Delivering Media with Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) Media Services and Microsoft Silverlight MIX09-T56F

By: John Bishop, John Bocharov Tags: Media | Servers

See how to deliver media with the best user experience in a cost-effective, scalable, and highly manageable way. Learn how to expand your reach and improve quality using Smooth Streaming, how to save on bandwidth, and how to maintain control when using Progressive Download. Understand how IIS Media Services and WMS light up the media ecosystem from encoding to playback.

Others have noted we’re racing along at un-Microsoft speeds with Silverlight and Smooth Streaming. It’s only six months since we shipped Silverlight 2 and we’re already at Silverlight 3 beta. And Smooth Streaming wasn’t even announced then and we’ve already got on-demand and live servers in beta. But hey, this is the internet, and that’s how fast we have to go.

And of course this is only possible with the great foundations of technologies like Windows Media, .NET, IIS, and Windows. And at least as important, with the great partners like Inlet we’ve been working with for years. We’re all really excited about what’s possible here, and pushing to get it out there so people can use it quickly. We’ve known what video on the web could become for more than a decade now, and it feels like we’ve finally entered that last lap toward the finish line.

And a great event to be focusing on would be…

Live Smooth Streaming for the 2010 Winter Olympics

It seems like I’m only just now catching up on my sleep from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, but the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver are less than 11 months away (staring.

And yesterday, as part of Scott’s keynote, Perkins Miller (senior vice president, Digital Media, for NBC Universal Sports and Olympics) announced we’ll be doing Vancouver with Silverlight and Smooth Streaming.  And building on the Bejing experience with 720p HD and much deeper interactivity and information. His whole comments are great, including some interesting numbers about Beijing viewership and NBCU’s vision for the 2010 experience .  I’ll just close out this already long post quoting his section from the transcript:

PERKINS MILLER: Thank you, Scott.

Hello, everybody! I was here about one year ago at this time, in fact, as we were preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. How many people here watched some of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, those phenomenal athletes? (Applause.) I mean, it was just incredible. I mean, it was the single largest viewed audience that we had on television in history. It was also the single largest digital event in history. And we did that in partnership with Scott's team here, with the Silverlight group.

It was phenomenal. We did more than 50 million unique visitors, more than 1.3 billion page views. We streamed more than 70 million clips in the 17-day period of time. We served up 10 million hours of video.

And critically we served up 5,000 individual clips for consumers each and every day of the second week of the Olympics.

And what that really showed us is that the long tail really works. People in their desk, in their houses wanted to go watch rowing, wanted to go watch beach volleyball, wanted to watch all these sports at their time, at their leisure, and we enabled them to do it. It was an absolutely phenomenal partnership.

It really worked out well for us on the commercial side supporting all our interests. We were able to show for people who went to NBCOlympics.com and watched video and consumed content there, when they went back to watching their television, they watched twice as much television. Think about that, twice as much television for people who went and used a digital platform. It really brought to life the fact that we need to deliver as a media company a full 360-degree experience to our customers.

In addition, the people who watched video online during the time, if they were in the office or at their house, those folks who went and used the enhanced experience – you're seeing some of the examples here on the screen – these people who watched the enhanced experience like picture-in-picture, being able to watch four live feeds simultaneously, they watched three times as much video as those people who just chose to watch a single stream or a less enhanced experience.

What that told us is if we deliver a higher-quality experience, if we deliver something that's going to engage the audience, they will watch more. They will be more engaged by our product, and they will ultimately serve as a better audience to our product. So, it was really a tremendous experience.

Now, who knows, how many people can tell me where the next Olympics are? Anybody? OK, I didn't hear anything. Oh, come on, Vancouver, 2010. It's the winter Olympics. It was kind of a trick question; there are summer and winter games. So, the next Olympics are in Vancouver, Canada. They're roughly a year from now.

And I'm here to announce for the first time a renewal of our partnership with Silverlight. They will be providing the enhanced online video coverage for NBC's coverage of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. (Cheers, applause.)

And I am truly honored to be out here today because Scott's team has just done a phenomenal job coming up with what we think is going to be the ultimate product for a video event online. We're going to be streaming the Olympics fully in HD. This is going to be an adaptive, Smooth Streaming event, full 720p.

So, when you walk out of your house in the morning, and you go to your office, and you've left your beautiful 52-inch HD television at home, and you sit down at your desk and you want to grab some video from the Olympics that day, it's going to mirror that experience. We're going to be able to deliver you that continuous, high quality experience that you expect now as a consumer.

In addition, we're going to be able to bring you the DVR experience that you expect. So, just as Scott was illustrating earlier, you'll be able to pause the live stream, you'll be able to rewind the live stream, you'll even be able to go slow motion. So, for those of you who have been following the World Cup skiing this winter, there's a woman by the name of Lindsey Vonn who absolutely lit the world on fire. She won the World Cup overall. She is skiing phenomenally well. And if you want to see her fly off a 150-foot jump in the Vancouver Olympics – 50 meters for those from Canada – you'll be able to watch here in slow-mo online land those jumps and go through to the finish line.

We'll also be able to deliver to you full metadata overlays. What this means is that we'll be able to take the live results, the athlete biographies, the country information, all the information that gives you the kind of context for when the Olympics is, and deliver it to you as part of the enhanced Olympics experience. So, if you don't know who Lindsey Vonn is, you'll be able to find out who she is.

In addition, we've found that when you're watching the Olympics, and when you're trying to be engaged in this event, it's all-consuming. People want to know what's happening, when it's happening, and they want to consume the content where they are, whenever they are. This means that live video alerts are going to be critical. And for these games we'll deliver you not only live video alerts, we'll be able to give you real time feeds of those alerts. So, if you signed up to get the most popular clip of that moment, we'll deliver that to you. And again it will come through, depending on your platform, as a full HD experience.

Finally, because we need to commercialize this, for those of you that know the sports business, we do need to find ways to bring our partners to the table. We have the ability this time to do live ad insertion with our live streams. This functionality is going to be critical to give you as a consumer a fairly seamless experience, still be able to enjoy the live event, but allow our commercial partners access in order to find a way to associate with this great event that we'll be putting on together.

So, I can't tell you how excited I am. I'm thrilled to be here, I'm thrilled to be working with Scott's team. We have 331 days to go to the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, and I hope you all watch, and thanks very much. (Applause.)

In closing, I’d like to add my own (Applause) as well. Great stuff.

Although it’s only 329 days now. Back to work…

A developer release, not a consumer release

Note that this is a developer release. Silverlight 2 was unique in scope, being the first release with managed code, so we did some consumer events using Beta 2, most notably the NBC Olympics coverage. We’re not planning on doing anything customer-facing with Silverlight 3 until the full release. So this is really a change for developers, designers, and media folks to get a head start on using the new features, and giving us feedback on any issues. End users are welcome to play around with it (I’ve got it installed on my home machines without any issues), but don’t expect to see much stuff on the web taking advantage of it until after it ships.

What’s Available

First off, here’s the Silverlight-specific downloads released today. The official Get Started page is at Silverlight.net.  And Tim Heuer has a great overview of everything.

• Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio
• Expression Blend 3 Preview
• Silverlight 3 SDK CHM File
• Updated Silverlight Toolkit

MPEG-4 (H.264 and AAC-LC) support

First up, as we discussed back at IBC, we’re adding support for MPEG-4 content in Silverlight. Specifically, we’re supporting

• Self-contained .mp4 (including .f4v and .m4a) and .mov file formats (no reference movies or anything fancy like that).
• H.264 video in Simple, Main, and High 4:2:0 profiles (progressive scan only)
• AAC-LC audio mono or stereo (HE AAC will play back with lower fidelity, as in QuickTime)
• Local files or http progressive download.

Or, sliced another way, Silverlight 3 will be able to play pretty much all MPEG-4 files that would play back well in both QuickTime and Flash.

The H.264 and AAC-LC decoders are exposed via the MediaStreamSource used by Smooth Streaming, which means extending support to other file formats and protocols will work there as well. And of course, Smooth Streaming will support H.264 and AAC-LC as well.

Raw AV Pipeline

MediaStreamSource started with the ability to pass off VC-1 and WMA bitstreams to the decoder from managed code, enabling us to add protocol and format support within Silverlight. Most of Smooth Streaming on the client is implemented in C# as MediaStreamSource code. And we’re extending that to H.264 and AAC-LC. But there’s a huge number of other codecs out there that different markets are using and have asked to have in Silverlight. In fact, far more than we can reasonably build and test, and far more than we’d want to have to make everyone download in the installer.

So, instead we added three very simple but very powerful new outputs to MediaStreamSource: YV12, RGBA, and PCM.

Yep, managed code can now output uncompressed video frames and uncompressed audio straight to the media pipeline.

Most video codecs are going to use YV12, which is a flavor of the  a standard Y’CbCr 4:2:0 format used in most video codecs . We also wanted RGBA to enable video with alpha channels, and also any media formats that are natively RGB. And of course PCM is classic uncompressed audio.

Using a managed decoder is transparent to the user; it’s just another managed code .dll included in the .xap file. Since it’s running inside the Silverlight sandbox, there’s no download or other action required by the user to activate it; acts just like any other codec.

So, what’s codec performance like in managed code? It’s actually going to be fine for a variety of tasks. In our internal testing and prototyping, managed code offers about half the speed of a native compiled version. So for older codecs like MPEG-2, a managed decoder should be fine on a wide variety of hardware.

And remember, managed code doesn’t require C#. Existing decoders in C or C++ can be used as the basis for a managed decoder. The main restrictions are that native MMS/SSE and pointers can’t be used.

I can’t wait to see what other kinds of formats and codecs people wind up delivering with the Raw AV Pipeline. We’ve already seen some very neat demos.

GPU scaling and compositing

Silverlight 3 adds GPU support for scaling and compositing. Other products may call this something like “GPU accelerated video playback” which can be a little confusing – this isn’t GPU video decoding ala DXVA. What it does is take bitmap elements, including video, into the pipeline at their native size and then the GPU takes care of scaling each object to its final size, and then doing the final blending and compositing of the whole application. For media players, this essentially gives every player Fast Path performance. So while it does accelerate video playback, it’s not actually accelerating video decode per se. But on single-core machines, anything we can do to save CPU from other tasks to give more to the video decoder, the better. Again, the net effect is lower system requirements for any content that gets scaled; which should often improve the bitrate lower-end machines can play in Smooth Streaming.

There’s a few new facets to tuning a player for GPU playback, so it’ll need to be turned on explicitly in the application. But the performance gains for any video that’s scales are tremendous, so we’re going to help making sure everyone knows how to get it on and reap the benefits.

Full-screen GPU scaling/compositing will be supported on all Macs and all Windows machines with DirectX 9 or higher (which is XP SP1 and higher – that’s most machines and GPUs out in the wild today). Due to platform limitations, Silverlight on Mac won’t support GPU compositing inside the browser window, but will in full-screen mode. For performance-critical players (particularly in HD) a good compromise there is to set Stretch=”None” for the browser version and scale in full-screen mode, so that the windowed version is Fast Path and the full-screen is GPU composited for equivalent performance.

Improved logging

Robust and detailed logging has long been a critical feature for Windows Media to enable advertising and billing.

We’re extending that support to Silverlight 3, for both Windows Media and Smooth Streaming. I’ll provide a link to the full details when they’re posted.

Media pipeline improvements

We’ve done some under-the-hood work in Silverlight to optimize for silky-smooth video playback with as few dropped frames as possible. For the beta, we’ve focused mainly on single and dual-core systems, and you should see some significant improvements with the same player and content in SIlverlight 2 (and of course using the GPU when scaling will offer further performance gains).

Out of Browser Silverlight applications

Silverlight 3 will allow applications to be dragged out of the browser and onto the local system as a standalone, double-clickable app. This is useful for all kinds of applications, of course, but for media players it’s great to not have to launch the browser when all you want is an applet media player. This includes offline support, so a Silverlight media player could be used on an airplane or anywhere else without a network connection. And since it’s a real Silverlight app, it still uses the secure sandbox and so Admin rights on the machine aren’t required to install or run it. We’ve got nice integration for both Mac and Windows with Start Menu and Dock compatibility.  Ashish’s blog has lots of details.