Author Archives: Alex Zambelli

About Alex Zambelli

Alex is a Product Manager at Discovery in Bellevue, WA. Prior to his current job he was a Product Manager at Hulu and iStreamPlanet (Turner), and Technical Evangelist for media technologies at Microsoft. He has been professionally involved with development of digital video and streaming technologies since 2002.

New Year, New Job, New Challenges

As we leave 2012 behind us and turn our attention to 2013, the time has come for me to share some exciting personal news. After 10 years at Microsoft I have recently decided to leave the company to pursue other career opportunities. … Continue reading

Posted in Smooth Streaming | 3 Comments

H2 2012 Media Platform Product Update Roundup

It’s been a busy summer with most of the team focused on Windows Azure Media Services, but I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few other Media Platform releases of the past few months: November 7, 2012 Player … Continue reading

Posted in Internet Information Services, Smooth Streaming, Windows | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Windows Azure Media Services Preview Launched!

I’ve been holding back this post for about two weeks now, wanting to make sure the service got rolled out to all major Windows Azure datacenters first, but here it is now: Windows Azure Media Services Preview has been launched! The new … Continue reading

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IIS Transform Manager 1.0 and Windows 8 Updates

The long awaited 1.0 release of IIS Transform Manager (which for a while there seemed stuck in GMail-like alpha/beta development) finally hit the Web last week! You can download it and read more about its features here: http://www.iis.net/download/transformmanager John Deutscher … Continue reading

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Announcing Windows Azure Media Services and MPEG-DASH support

This week at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas we made two big announcements: “New cloud-based Windows Azure Media Services is designed to make creating, managing and delivering media to any device easier than ever by … Continue reading

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Extending Smooth Streaming Reach

Smooth Streaming has been a pivotal technology of the Microsoft Media Platform since its introduction in IIS Media Services 2.0 in 2009. And though it’s been commonly associated with Silverlight over the years, those familiar with Smooth Streaming architecture and … Continue reading

Posted in Internet Information Services, Smooth Streaming | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Silverlight and Its Role In the Future of Microsoft Media

“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain* It’s been two months since version 5 of Microsoft Silverlight was released to the web. If you haven’t installed it already, you can get the latest version here. For the first … Continue reading

Posted in HTML5, Silverlight, Smooth Streaming | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

H2 2011 Product Update Roundup

It’s been a while since I updated the blog, so I will take this opportunity to bring everyone up to speed on the more recent Microsoft Media Platform product updates: November 9, 2011 Player Framework version 1.0 for HTML5 is … Continue reading

Posted in Expression Encoder, Internet Information Services, Silverlight, Smooth Streaming | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

SMF 2.5 with 3D video support coming soon

Bob Cowherd from Vertigo Software has put together a nice blog post about one of the cool new features going into SMF 2.5:  stereoscopic 3D video support. We will ship SMF with a sample red-cyan anaglyph plugin, while NVIDIA will … Continue reading

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Transcoding 101 Roundtable, MIX 2011 and NAB 2011

A bit of shameless promotion: On Thursday, March 24th, I’ll be participating in a roundtable web event titled “Transcoding Methodology 101” hosted by Streaming Media. Joining me will be Kevin Louden (Telestream), Charlie Good (Wowza) and Jon Robbins (Rhozet). The … Continue reading

Posted in Expression Encoder, Internet Information Services, Silverlight, Smooth Streaming | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments