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NAB Show 2009 Through My Ears, Eyes and Sore Feet, Part 2

May 26, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

           

OK, second installment for my NAB impressions. In the first, I discussed highlights from the editing and camcorder world. Here, I’m back with some thoughts on the streaming side of the house, where some interesting trends are coming together.

Smooth Streaming

On the delivery front, Microsoft is really pushing Smooth Streaming as Silverlight’s key competitive advantage over streaming via Adobe Flash. What’s this all about? It’s interesting and something you need to at least know about, so take a deep breath and stay with me for the next four or five paragraphs.

The problem Microsoft targets with Smooth Streaming is how to deliver different streams to different viewer based upon their connection speeds and device playback capabilities, and how to adjust to changes in the viewer’s effective bandwidth. Here’s a blurb from the Microsoft website:

"Smooth Streaming dynamically detects and seamlessly switches the video quality of a media file a Silverlight player receives based on local PC conditions. Consumers with high-bandwidth connections can experience true HD (720p+), and others with lower bandwidth speeds receive the appropriate stream for their connectivity, allowing the audience to enjoy a consistent high-quality streaming experience without buffering or stuttering."

There are several aspects to this technology: first, the ability to choose the best stream for the target viewer, and second, to adjust to changes in the delivery or playback environment. These capabilities have been available, more or less, since the late ’90s when it was pioneered by RealNetworks and popularized by Microsoft’s multiple bit rate technology. The same basic feature set is also available from Adobe’s Flash Media Server as dynamic streaming.

What’s unique about Smooth Streaming? To borrow another blurb from the Microsoft site, it’s that it “enables adaptive streaming of live and on-demand media to Silverlight clients over HTTP.” In contrast, Adobe Flash uses Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). What’s the difference?

HTTP is the hypertext transfer protocol, the lingua franca of all web servers that’s used to transmit the images, text and PDF files delivered over the web. Adobe’s RTMP is a streaming protocol that requires a streaming server to communicate with each Flash Player, which means additional cost and additional IT expertise.

Microsoft can implement Smooth Streaming with an extension to its Internet Information Server (IIS), which means less dollars and less expertise. In addition, because Smooth Streaming uses HTTP, it’s more firewall friendly. It can also take advantage of proxy servers found in many organizations to cache data locally and serve multiple viewers from that cache, which is more efficient than transmitting a separate stream to each viewer.