Microsoft has just released a detailed case study of the SNF project describing the partners, products, tools and workflow used to deliver the final solution. You can check it out here:

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000006602

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/808/sunday-night-football-live-in-hd-with-microsoft-silverlight-3-and-iis-smooth-streaming/

I believe a similar case study is currently underway for the NBC/CTV/NRK Vancouver Olympics project, but it’ll probably be a few months before it’s released.

A year ago we began working with NBC and CTV on putting together the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics video site, later adding Norway’s NRK as another customer. We teamed up with a number of partners to get the job done:

• iStreamPlanet – video encoding services and hosting operations
• Akamai – edge content delivery
• Vertigo – Silverlight player design and development
• Delta Tre – content management systems, ad insertion, realtime data integration, player development, site integration
• Inlet – live video encoders
• Rhozet, Anystream (Grab Networks) - offline video (VOD) encoders
• Switch Communications – datacenter hosting
• SouthWorks.net – Rough Cut Editor design and development
• DoubleClick – ad serving
• Signiant – content distribution software
• Conviva – usage tracking and analytics
• Wintellect – origin health monitoring and maintenance
• Intel, Dell – server hardware

As you can tell just from the list of partners, this was a hugely complex project. Despite the Winter Olympics being smaller in scale than Summer Olympics, I’d estimate that this project was about 2-3 times more complex than the Beijing 2008 Olympics project due to the additional technical challenges we decided to take on in order to raise the bar in online video streaming.

In order to reduce some of the complexity we also made an early decision to deliver everything exclusively in Smooth Streaming and Silverlight, without a WMS/WMP fallback option. Though I’m sure some critics will be quick to assert such a decision was meant to force greater Silverlight adoption, the truth is less political and more practical: Trying to encode all videos for both Windows Media and Smooth Streaming (let alone additional formats such as MP4/H.264) would’ve probably doubled or tripled the cost and severely impacted the amount of functionality we were able to add to the client.

If you follow Smooth Streaming developments, you’ve probably heard of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit and the Silverlight Media Framework. Both of these frameworks and their underlying Smooth Streaming Media Element (SSME) were in fact designed for the Olympics project and first put to test on NBC Sunday Night Football 6 months ago. And while on the client side the Olympics player is actually quite similar to the SNF player (aside from the much improved rew/ffwd/slo-mo features and the lack of multi-camera angles), the chief difference between the Olympics and SNF is actually on the backend. One word: automation.

From a video operations standpoint, SNF was very much a manual operation. We created publishing points and started encoders by hand – and then stopped them 4 hours later. When you’re doing only one game a week, you can afford to do that with just a few people. But when you have to run 20-30 events per day, as many as dozen of those simultaneously, for 2 weeks straight – it’s absolutely unthinkable to try to run everything by hand. You’d need an army of engineers just to keep things running smoothly.

Enter iStreamPlanet. Our encoding service partner took it upon themselves to build a fully automated live video encoding service for the Olympics. This involved: turning on H.264 multicast decoders (our source streams arrive from Vancouver as H.264 multicast streams over dedicated OC-12) and tuning them to the right channels; routing the decoded video to the available Inlet Spinnaker HD encoders; creating multiple publishing points on IIS origin servers; starting publishing points and encoders; stopping encoders and publishing points; moving VOD archives to expected locations. Having such a service allowed Delta Tre, our CMS provider, to remotely schedule events without any human involvement required. For a young technology such as Smooth Streaming this is a big deal because it proves it’s possible to scale Smooth Streaming to large professional broadcast environments.

Another huge development and step forward for this project was the creation of the Rough Cut Editor, a soon to be publicly available “light touch” editor for Smooth Streams. The RCE allows editing of Smooth Streaming sources, both on-demand and live (!), without any re-encoding whatsoever. The concept is remarkably simple: if a Smooth Streaming manifest is like a playlist of video/audio fragments which live in the cloud, then editing, merging and appending multiple Smooth Streaming sources should be as simple as re-arranging entries in a manifest. Since Smooth Streaming video is just a series of fragments and each 2-sec fragment must be downloaded separately, it’s completely irrelevant whether fragments are downloaded/played in a sequential or non-sequential order – the end result plays equally smooth either way. This is something that hasn’t been possible with Windows Media or any other streaming media technology until now. It’s a total game-changer.

http://www.iis.net/extensions/LiveSmoothStreaming

Chris Knowlton has written an excellent summary of everything that’s gone into this release. Here’s just a brief list of components:

• Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of media over HTTP
• Live Smooth Streaming, for live adaptive streaming of broadcast events
• Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, for creating custom clients
• Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player
• Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content
• Advanced Logging, with real-time client- and server-side logging
• Application Request Routing (ARR), providing HTTP proxying and caching

Read more about IISMS 3.0 here.

A whole blog post of its own could be written about the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, and that’s precisely what Vishal Sood has done here. The Player SDK and its introduction of Smooth Streaming Media Element (SSME) are incredibly important for incorporating Smooth Streaming support into Silverlight projects. Closely modeled after the native Media Element interface, the SSME allows developers to seamlessly integrate both on-demand and live Smooth Streaming into their apps without worrying about complex heuristics while at the same time giving them rich control over Smooth Streaming events and properties. Here’s just a sampling of SSME’s features:

• Basic Playback controls
  • APIs like Play, Pause, Stop, etc.
  • Events for Playback and Diagnostics
  • Properties to track position, etc.
• Advanced Playback support
  • DVR support for Live Smooth Streaming
  • Trick Play: Slow Motion
• Monetization
  • Ad Playback integration – scheduling capabilities, tracking Ad progress
  • Live Ad Insertion w/ Live Smooth Streaming
  • Rich Analytics w/ IIS Advanced Logging
• Content Protection – Play Ready integration
• XAML support for designers
• Selecting Tracks for playback (e.g., restrict the bit-rates available, support multiple camera angles in a single stream, etc.)
• Support for progressive download Ads/content
• Almost all of the Silverlight Media Element APIs are available for Smooth Streaming w/ SSME

If you want to see an example of IIS Media Services 3.0 and SSME in action, just check out the Sunday Night Football player (U.S. only) every Sunday at 5 pm PST. The player is built on SSME, and the origin servers are running IISMS 3.0.

Today we are launching the NBC Sunday Night Football website: http://snfextra.nbcsports.com featuring a truly cutting-edge video player powered by Microsoft Silverlight and IIS7 Smooth Streaming.

The first game, Titans vs Steelers, is to be broadcast today (September 10th) at 5 pm PST. The next game, Bears vs Packers, is scheduled for this Sunday (September 13th) at 5 pm PST. Due to NBC broadcast rights for SNF, the website is restricted to U.S.-based users only (sorry, expats!).

The project is the culmination of over 5 months of hard work involving NBC, Microsoft (technical project management and core technologies), iStreamPlanet (video encoding services and realtime data integration), Vertigo (player design and development), Akamai (content delivery), Inlet (video encoding technology), Conviva (realtime content delivery analytics), Omniture (web analytics) and DoubleClick (advertising).

The SNF player will feature:

• Live Smooth Streaming video, for all of the content, all of the time
• Seamless on-demand switching between the 720p HD main broadcast feed and four 480p SD alternate camera angles
• Full motion thumbnail previews of all alternate camera angles
• Seeking, pausing, fast forwarding and rewinding of live video
• Slow motion and instant replay
• Realtime play-by-play data available on the timeline and pop-up menu, providing instant access to all key game plays
• Realtime game stats data
• Dynamic mid-stream ad insertion (matching where the ads would appear in a TV broadcast)
• Silverlight 3 support for GPU-accelerated video scaling for improved video playback performance

There are a ton of other features I’m probably forgetting right now, but I will make sure to follow up soon with another blog post covering all those as well as the technical video details of the project (bitrates, resolutions, codecs, etc).

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/NAB-Day-1-Smooth-Streaming-released-1080p-in-Silverlight-new-VC-1-and-more/

So the big news is: IIS Media Services 2.0 (featuring on-demand Smooth Streaming) has been officially released to Web, a mere 6 months after first announced at Digital Hollywood as a technology preview! We expect IIS Media Services 3.0 (featuring Live Smooth Streaming, currently in beta) to be released later this year.

Now we watch Smooth Streaming completely change the rules of media delivery on the Web.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=03d22583-3ed6-44da-8464-b1b4b5ca7520

The white paper is available in Word, PDF and XPS formats.

Here are the links to the videos of sessions I had previously mentioned:

What’s New in Microsoft Silverlight 3
Speaker:  Joe Stegman (Microsoft)

Microsoft Silverlight Media End-to-End
Speaker:  Alex Zambelli (Microsoft)

Creating Media Content for Microsoft Silverlight Using Microsoft Expression Encoder
Speaker:  James Clarke (Microsoft)

Delivering Media with Microsoft Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) Media Services and Microsoft Silverlight
Speakers:  John Bocharov (Microsoft), John Bishop (Inlet)

Silverlight 3 Beta

A mere 5 months after releasing Silverlight 2 RTW, we have now made Silverlight 3 Beta available to the public. Check out http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx for the full list of new features and download links. As usual, Scott Guthrie offers some great insight on Silverlight 3 in his MIX Keynote and Channel 9 video.

The most interesting new media features in Silverlight 3 are:

• Native H.264 video, AAC audio, and MP4 file playback support
  • Take your MP4-contained H.264/AAC encoded files, put them on a Web server and play them directly in Siverlight using progressive download!
• Extensible media format support
  • Support for raw A/V bitstream playback allows codec and media developers to write custom decoders and format parsers using C#, VB or any other .NET language. Will you be the first to write an Ogg Vorbis or FLAC decoder for Silverlight?
• GPU accelerated video scaling
  • Stretching the video to full screen can now be offloaded entirely to the video card, freeing up the CPU and enabling smooth video playback.
• Advanced media logging
  • Log playback usage to Windows Media Services and IIS7 Media Services, like with the good old Windows Media Player.
• Custom effects / Pixel shaders
  • Apply post-processing effects to your video by writing custom effects using the same HLSL pixel shader code that works in Direct3D and WPF today.
• Perspective 3D transforms
  • Spin and rotate your video around all 3 axis – X, Y and Z. Video collage? How about a video cube?

I’ll be blogging in the near future in more depth about the details of our H.264/AAC/MP4 support in particular.

IIS Media Services 3.0 / Live Smooth Streaming

Just a short month after announcing the availability of Smooth Streaming for On-Demand Video beta, the IIS Media team announced the availability of IIS Media Services 3.0 beta – featuring Live Smooth Streaming. That’s right, with IIS7 you will soon be able to deliver Smooth Streaming video for both on-demand and live!

Inlet Technologies has simultaneously announced they will be the first to add Smooth Streaming support to their line of live and VoD encoding products. Besides Inlet, we are currently working with a number of encoding ISVs on enabling them to add Smooth Streaming support to their products.

Akamai Technologies announced the wide commercial availability of their AdaptiveEdge Streaming service based on IIS Smooth Streaming. Besides Akamai, we are currently working with all the major CDNs on enabling Smooth Streaming support in their networks. As with the encoding ISVs, our goal is to build a rich Smooth Streaming ecosystem to be available to customers by the time Silverlight 3 ships.

Besides the newly redesigned home page, the IIS Media team has also put up a great working example of how Smooth Streaming works.

NBC Winter Olympics 2010 – Vancouver

During the MIX 2009 Keynote, Perkins Miller, Senior VP of Digital Media for NBC Universal, announced that NBC Universal has chosen to deliver the NBC Winter Olympics 2010 using Microsoft Silverlight. Watch the MIX Keynote to see his announcement.

Here are the details I can share at this point:

• All video content, both live and on-demand, will be delivered using Smooth Streaming
• The live video player will feature DVR-like capabilities (pause, rewind, seek and slo-mo of live video)
• Video quality will go up to true 720p HD

March Madness

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:

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.

If you’re interested in the world of online video streaming (and I guess you are since you’re already reading this blog) and plan on visiting MIX 2009, I suggest you check out the following few sessions while there:

What’s New in Microsoft Silverlight 3
Speaker:  Joe Stegman (Microsoft)
Date/Time:  Wed, March 18, 11:30 AM – 12:15 PM
Location:  Lando 4204

Microsoft Silverlight Media End-to-End
Speaker:  Alex Zambelli (Microsoft)
Date/Time:  Wed, March 18, 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM
Location:  Delfino 4105

Creating Media Content for Microsoft Silverlight Using Microsoft Expression Encoder
Speaker:  James Clarke (Microsoft)
Date/Time:  Wed, March 18, 4:00 PM – 5:15 PM
Location:  Delfino 4105

Delivering Media with Microsoft Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) Media Services and Microsoft Silverlight
Speakers:  John Bocharov (Microsoft), John Bishop (Inlet)
Date/Time:  Thu, March 19, 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM
Location:  Delfino 4105

For a complete list of sessions, see https://content.visitmix.com/2009/sessions/.

To register for MIX 2009, visit http://2009.visitmix.com/Registration/.

Hope to see you there!

http://alexzambelli.com/blog/smooth-streaming-faq/