During the Streaming Video West show the folks at Microsoft spent a lot of time explaining their offerings. They had a seminar about “Live Broadcasting for Silverlight and Windows Media Player”. They also had a large booth on the show floor and were a Platinum Sponsor for the event.

Between the seminar and our conversations with their knowledgeable Microsoft technicians on the show floor, we learned a lot.

Streaming media technology enables the real-time or on-demand distribution of audio, video, and multimedia on the Internet. Streaming media is the simultaneous transfer of digital media (video, voice, and data) so that it is received as a continuous real-time stream. Streamed data is transmitted by a server application and received and displayed in real-time by client applications.

The seminar went over the basics of installing both Silverlight and Windows Media Player. In April 2007, Microsoft officially launched their cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for delivering what they called the next generation of user experiences and rich Internet applications for the Web. Their technology was formerly known as WPF/E and was renamed as Silverlight. Silverlight offers consistent viewing and listening experiences for both Mac and Windows users on a variety of browsers, including Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Safari.

Silverlight powered the NBC Olympics streaming video systems. The NBC video player, which streamed content in 350kbits and 650kbits bitrates using Windows Media Services, was written using managed code on top of the .NET Framework subset included with Silverlight.

The Microsoft technician gave out some astonishing facts from the recent Beijing Olympics: There were 13.5 million video streams for the Beijing games, versus 2.2 million for the entire Athens games, a difference of 514%. Through the first four days, there were 16.9 million unique users for the Beijing games, versus 11.1 million for the entire Athens games. There were 291.1 million page views for Beijing versus 229.9 million for the entire Athens games.

NBC and Microsoft enabled computer users to watch more than 3,500 hours of Olympics coverage, with nearly 3,000 hours of live coverage available.

On the server side of the equation, there are a couple of standard configuration possibilities for running Windows Media Services on either Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008.

The most basic is a single server configuration:

In a single-server installation, one Windows Media server works with one or more encoders to stream content to a small group of clients. The configuration might look like this:

The single-server installation update is easiest because you only run through the process once. Ideally, you would have a spare computer on which you can perform a clean installation of Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 and Windows Media Services. This is beneficial because you can keep your existing server in production until all installation and testing of the new server is complete, minimizing service disruption for your viewers.

Next is the multiple server, enterprise installation, at a centralised location:

In this scenario, two or more Windows Media servers are located on one site and work in tandem to deliver content to multiple clients. Sometimes the second server acts as a backup that is activated if the first server fails. In other situations, hardware or software load balancers are used to distribute client requests among multiple servers so none of the servers get overloaded. The configuration might look like this:

Updating a multiple server, centralised system is more complex than the single-server update because it requires that you run through the process multiple times. While you are updating one server, the other servers in the cluster can share the load, but you will have to plan accordingly to ensure that you use only the Windows Media Services features on the updated computer that are compatible with the version of Windows Media Services on the remaining servers in the cluster until all are updated.

If you got lost in the above installation process, Microsoft has excellent documentation on its Web site to read and download before embarking on the installation process.

Microsoft's Silverlight and Media Services have competitors with big names like Adobe Flash and Real Networks Media Server. There was also a host of specialty server and client products that were sprinkled around the Streaming Media West show floor. We highlighted one of those in another article which talked about Bollywood TV. X