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.

http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/WKSP07

“Managing the media production pipeline for a site like NBC Olympics or NFL Football can be challenging. From real time video feeds and smooth streaming, to asset management, cutting-edge video players, and multiple media formats, tools, and codecs; you need to plan carefully to ensure that your process runs like a well-oiled machine. Come learn the best practices for setting up your media production workflow, developed in some of the most demanding media sites on the Web.”

It’s not too late to sign up for it, even if you’ve already registered for the conference.

Register for MIX here: http://live.visitmix.com/Registration

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.

Remember, even though the Olympics Games are an international event, the International Olympics Committe (IOC) sells Olympic broadcast rights exclusively to 1 broadcaster per country – and only for that country. While that practice obviously originated for television broadcasts, the IOC still hasn’t gotten around to changing the rules for online streaming, which unfortunately means that access to Olympic video content on NBC, CTV and NRK sites is restricted to American, Canadian and Norwegian users only, respectively. No, they won’t check your passport, but they will check your IP address.

So if you’re lucky enough to live in the United States, Canada or Norway, you can check out the Silverlight and Smooth Streaming powered video coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics by visiting the following sites:

• United States:  http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/
• Canada:  http://www.ctvolympics.ca/video/index.html
• Norway:  http://www.nrkol.no/video/index.html

You will, of course, need Silverlight 3 installed to view any of the video content. If in doubt whether you have the latest version of Silverlight, visit http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx. Silverlight 3 works on Windows and Mac OS (Intel only); and with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and (still unofficially) Chrome browsers. If you’re a Linux user, you might be pleased to know that the Novell Moonlight team has been working frantically to get Moonlight 3.0 ready in time for the Winter Olympics. It’s still just a preview release so your mileage may vary, but please give it a shot – you can download Moonlight 3.0 Preview 2 here. I recommend reading the prerelease notes for Moonlight team’s recommendations on browser builds.

Everyone should also be aware than not all broadcasters have chosen to make the same amount of Olympics content available to their viewers. While CTV’s and NRK’s coverage is pretty much unlimited and requires no special sign-up process, NBC has chosen to restrict access to “premium” content only to cable/satellite/IPTV customers. First time you try to access such content you will be asked to sign in with your Comcast/DirectTV/Cox/DISH/TimeWarner/etc account. Many more providers are supported, but be prepared to possibly jump through some hoops to prove that you’re an NBC affiliate customer. In addition to the sign-up procedure, NBC is also withholding much of the live online coverage, preferring to show the popular events on primetime television first. Don’t shoot the messenger.

If you experience any issues with Silverlight or content access, there’s a good FAQ over on the NBC website: http://www.nbcolympics.com/faq/index.html.

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.

But one of the other potential uses for MediaStreamSource that emerged during SL3 development was video and audio synthesis. After all, why limit A/V creation to just decode from existing content? You can create a sound waveform or a raster bitmap using .NET math functions and then present it to the Silverlight runtime to render like any other audio or video.

Well, I was extremely happy to find out today that developers are catching on to this fantastic new feature. Namely, Pete Brown, a Washington DC-based .NET developer and evangelist has been using MediaStreamSource to synthesize video, audio and – my favorite – emulate a Commodore 64 computer!

Check out:

Creating Sound using MediaStreamSource in Silverlight 3 Beta

Silverlight 3 – Creating Video from Raw Bits using a MediaStreamSource

My MIX09 Silverlight 3 ShowOff Video – Commodore 64 Emulator

All awesome stuff. Way to go, Pete!

But what about custom codec development? If you’re a codec developer, I invite you to take a look at MediaStreamSource and consider writing a C# decoder for Silverlight. There are plenty of open-source codecs and formats out there that would make for fantastic Silverlight demos. Just to list a few:

Containers

• Matroska
• Ogg
• Ogg Media

Video

• Dirac
• Theora
• HuffYUV
• Lagarith

Audio

• Vorbis
• FLAC
• Monkey’s Audio
• Shorten

These are just some of the codecs and formats out there with easily accessible source code that could be ported to C# or another .NET language. But of course, why stop there? There are also formats such as MPEG-2 TS, FLV, AVI, and codecs such as H.263, MPEG-4 ASP, MJPEG, MPEG Audio Layer II, and others that would be incredibly useful to have supported in Silverlight too.

Will you be the first to develop those?

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)