IIS Media Services 3.0 and Player SDK released!

Last week was a big one for Smooth Streaming! IIS Media Services 3.0, the IIS7 media extensions pack containing Smooth Streaming, has completed its 6-month beta development cycle and has been released to Web. You can download it here:

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.