Entries tagged with playready - Channel 10

Silverlight 2 powering Netflix on Mac

benwaggoner — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:38:00 GMT

It's been discussed for a while, but the time is now - Netflix has just announced Silverlight 2 will power their streaming video service, which had been Windows-only until now. Silverlight 2 adds support for PlayReady DRM, so we now have the same DRM support on Mac and Windows. The service will be available on Xbox 360 as well.

You have to be a Netflix subscriber of course, but the content is commercial-free and much higher quality than the various free video services. They encode up to a full 720x480, in proper 4:3 or 16:9, at a range of bitrates. The higher rates definitely outperform standard def cable and satellite in video quality.

Lots of good stuff in the press release, but I had a couple of things I wanted to call out (bolding mine).

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), the world's largest online movie rental service, today announced it has begun the deployment of Microsoft Silverlight to enhance the instant watching component of the Netflix service and to allow subscribers for the first time to watch movies and TV episodes instantly on their Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers. The deployment, which will initially touch a small percentage of new Netflix subscribers, is the first step in an anticipated roll-out of the new platform to all Netflix subscribers by the end of the year.

Note that this won’t be immediately available to all customers.

Silverlight is designed for delivery of cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences inside a Web browser. It is expected that Netflix members who watch movies and TV episodes instantly on their computers will enjoy a faster, easier connection and a more robust viewing experience with Silverlight, due to the quality built directly into the player. Among the viewing enhancements with the new player is a breakthrough in timeline navigation that vastly improves the use of fast-forwarding and rewinding. The new Netflix player takes advantage of PlayReady DRM, which is built into Silverlight, for the playback of protected content on both Windows-based PCs and on Macs. That had not been possible with previous generation technologies.

This is one of the first big rollouts of PlayReady with Silverlight in the USA. When you see the new navigation, it’s a real testament to the difference between a media player plugin like the WMP OCX, and a rich application runtime that plays media well like Silverlight.

The rich user experience support and DRM, what else does Silverlight bring to the equation? One big thing is that PlayReady DRM supports http delivery of pre-encrypted content, unlike other platforms that require a proprietary streaming server and protocol be used to deliver protected content, applying DRM on the fly. Pre-encrypted content is both more scalable (since the encryption processing is only done once, not per user), and more secure (since an in-the-clear media file doesn’t need to be transmitted and stored on the server).

There’s been two big technical challenges in web video for the last dozen years or so.

How do we deliver the best experience to each user, in a world of variable bandwidth and hardware power
How do we deliver that experience as cost effectively as possible, enabling new business models in video distribution.

We’re at the point now where a user with a fast connection and a decent computer should have a darn good video and audio experience. Netflix is a testament to what’s possible as the cost to deliver a MB of video gets low enough, from a business perspective. While finally delivering a user experience better than VideoCD.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is out!

benwaggoner — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:39:00 GMT

After months of hard work, Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and its SDK are now available for download!

The best overall description of what's in it is in this post from Scott Guthrie.

Media Features in Silverlight 2 Beta 2

Of course, my focus is on the media features. New to Beta 2 is:

Hooks to enable adaptive streaming

Beta2 adds client support for "adaptive streaming" - which enables managed code to be able to pull in media files and streams from arbitrary URLs, and then reassemble them and pass them off to the video and audio decoders. This can enable a whole lot of different ways to address how to make media available, including supporting seamless streaming switching between content encoded at different bitrates. And since this is all running inside managed code, a CDN or content provider can tune the heuristics used to get the optimal content from the optimum server.

While the API is in place, we don't have any full end-to-end demos for how this works at the moment; you'll be seeing a variety of ways to use this technology down the road. Since our API is so flexible, I imagine customers and partners will find all kinds of fun things to do with it.

Content Protection

Beta2 includes client sideWindows Media DRM 10 and PlayReady DRM support. Both work cross browser and cross platform. Note that WMDRM10 will require a PlayReady license server (available in the coming weeks); existing content will work with Silverlight, but with the new license server.

Server Side Playlists

Beta2 adds improved support for server side playlists on Windows Media Services (previous releases only supported client-side playlists). That's still a feature in development (we are still a beta), so if you have server-side playlists that aren't working as you expect, it'd be great if you could put a link in comments, or email them directly to me so we can see what's going on. Note that web playlists from the IIS 7.0 Media Pack have always been fully supported.

Quality and Performance improvements

While there's no API change here, Beta 2 includes a variety of improvements to both performance and quality (particularly scaling quality) during media playback. Full-screen playback in particular is improved.

Windows Media Audio 10 Professional

And don't forget that Silverlight 2 adds support for the WMA 10 Pro codec. This isn't changed from Beta 1, but it's a big improvement compared to the stock WMA in Silverlight 1. WMA 10 Pro in the 32-96 Kbps range is what we call the "LBR" or Low Bit Rate mode, which is up to 2x as efficient as classic WMA. Audio is quite understandable at 32 Kbps, danceable at 48, an flawless at 64-96. Expression Encoder 2 supports the new modes, and Windows Media Player 11 can play them back as well.

For Silverlight 2-only projects, WMA 10 Pro is the codec of choice for any kind of bandwidth constrained content. And, of course, it's supported in Expression Encoder 2.

Also, note that, like WMA, WMA 10 Pro also supports 2-pass VBR encoding, which can help quality further when doing progressive download. 48 Kbps average 96 Kbps peak can sound pretty great.

I'll try to get up some A/B comparison demos in the next few days.

NAB Silverlight News - new partners and Silverlight DRM

benwaggoner — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:43:00 GMT

NAB was a blast, as always. We had a great turnout at the booth and at our sessions relating to Silverlight, and the Compressionist Party was delightful as ever. My voice is still shot, though...

We had a couple of big announcements around Silverlight I wanted to mention here.

First, we announced New Support for Silverlight by Content Companies Worldwide

We're working with a ton of companies on content deals, but these five stand out for the reach of customers they're going to expose to Silverlight:

MSG Interactive is using Silverlight as a platform to deliver live on-demand digital content to Madison Square Garden's huge community of sports and entertainment fans.
Tencent, China’s largest Internet portal, with more than 300 million unique viewers, announced it is developing a series of Silverlight-based next-generation Internet services and media experiences.
Abertis Telecom will use Silverlight as the platform for a new video content delivery channel going live this spring, providing end users with convenient access to dozens of channels of Spanish-language TV content within a Web-based application.
Terra Networks is using Silverlight as the platform for the new HD channel on Terra TV, its online video and TV platform with service in 18 countries in Latin America and United States reaching millions of subscribers around the world.
Yahoo! JAPAN, the most trafficked Web site in Japan, plans to roll out video distribution and Internet services that use Silverlight as the application platform.

Second we also announced Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady, our DRM solution. The press release above still has the most public details now. Some of the high points include:

It will work in Silverlight 2 for both Mac and Windows
It is compatible with both the current Windows Media DRM 10 and the new PlayReady DRM
Details will be up at www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ soon.