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.

(img courtesy of News from Microsoft Ireland)

Deploying Silverlight in the Enterprise

As more and more Silverlight sites become available, enterprise administrators are starting to ask for guidance on how Silverlight should be deployed in a corporate environment. Obviously, at one level it's as straightforward as executing the installer, but there are typically a whole ton of questions that need answering:

• What files and registry keys does Silverlight install?
• Will Silverlight break any existing applications?
• What are the command-line switches to configure installation?
• How do I deploy Silverlight through SMS or System Center?
• How is Silverlight serviced and updated?
• How do you configure Silverlight settings via Group Policy?

Fortunately, one of my colleagues, David Tesar has kindly come to the rescue and written a very comprehensive white paper that answers all these questions plus many more. The Silverlight Enterprise Deployment Guide is available for download now. We gave the white paper a trial run ourselves when Microsoft IT used SMS to deploy Silverlight internally. Download it and send it to your systems administrator today - it's worth their time to read.

Making Silverlight Easier for Systems Administrators to Install

...we've made a few changes to the installation process to enable systems administrators to deploy Silverlight into enterprise environments more easily.
...Silverlight is available as an optional update for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 via the Windows Server Update Services tool (and, inevitably, Microsoft Update, since WSUS relies on Microsoft Update as its source for updates).

Many customers have requested help with deploying Silverlight internally, and this change will hopefully be welcomed by enterprises who want to distribute Silverlight within their organizations using their established management tools. By adding it as an optional update, enterprises can control the roll-out of Silverlight within their organizations and schedule its installation as a background task so that the perceptible impact is minimal, and ensure that end-users can view Silverlight content without requiring administrative rights to install the plug-in.

I'm really glad this is now available: the need for administrator rights to install a web plug-in is not unique to Silverlight, of course, but it's been raised a number of times as a potential blocker to enterprise adoption. Having this available will solve that problem and make it far easier for enterprise administrators to control deployment of Silverlight to their users.