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.

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.