Microsoft, Akamai Stream Silverlight

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, October 28. 2008 at 06:00 AM EDT Post a comment

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Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) is teaming up with Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) to enable media companies to serve high-quality online videos with a new HTTP-based "smooth streaming" technology.

With new server technology called Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7.0) Smooth Streaming, Microsoft will enable instant startup times with no buffering through adaptive streaming on its Silverlight video platform. And at least for now, it appears that Akamai is the only content delivery network (CDN) that will be deploying the technology.

Microsoft is making IIS Smooth Streaming available with the release of its Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1, which lets publishers encode various quality versions of a video file to an IIS server. When that file is requested, the server determines the highest-quality version to send based on the end user's connection, and updates the bits that are sent as conditions change.

The "smooth streaming" (or adaptive streaming) technology is akin to that used by Move Networks Inc. , which is very quickly gaining share in the market for high-quality video online, especially for large-scale live events.

Akamai will be the first content delivery network (CDN) to offer IIS smooth streaming, with a new service that the company (unimaginatively) calls Akamai AdaptiveEdge Streaming for Microsoft Silverlight.

The announcement may come as a bit of a blow to some other CDNs, especially Limelight Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW), as it gives Akamai first-mover advantage in being able to deploy "smooth streaming" for Silverlight.

The news is especially surprising given Limelight's partnership with Microsoft in delivering NBC Universal 's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In addition, the companies are in the second year of a five-year license agreement, under which Microsoft is building out CDN capabilities using Limelight technology.

To add insult to injury, it appears that the adaptive streaming technology that Microsoft is rolling out now with Akamai was at least partly developed during its partnership with Limelight for the Olympics. In an email, a Microsoft spokesperson writes, "The Silverlight player work and adaptive streaming heuristics (stream switching logic) were based off of the work done for NBCOlympics.com."

There are key differences between the technology used during the Olympics and that which is being enabled through Microsoft's partnership with Akamai, however.

NBCOlympics.com encoded the video at four different video levels, with each of those video files broken up into separate, 2-second chunks. The end result was 21,000 2-second video chunks for every three-hour broadcast.

By comparison, IIS "smooth streaming" works with complete files. When encoded in Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 11 and published to an IIS server, the server can determine which bits from each of those files to send on the fly.

Microsoft and Akamai are demoing the new technology at Digital Hollywood this week, and have created a showcase of the IIS smooth streaming in action at www.smoothHD.com. The companies expect beta availability of the service in early 2009.