Microsoft Silverlight Sees Smooth Streaming Adoption

Written by Ryan Lawler

Monday, April 20. 2009 at 09:00 AM EDT Post a comment

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Due in part to the availability of its "smooth streaming" adaptive bit-rate technology, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) says it is seeing increased adoption among media companies and service providers alike for the latest version of its Silverlight video platform.

On the customer front, Norwegian broadcaster TV 2 and sales channel HSN joined NBC Universal 's NBCOlympics.com, Canadian broadcaster CTV, and Italian public broadcaster RAI, as the newest announced customers to leverage Microsoft Silverlight's smooth streaming technology for the delivery of broadband video on their Websites.

While racking up new customers, Silverlight also announced more support from service providers. Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) was the first content delivery network (CDN) to deploy the Silverlight smooth streaming technology, which adjusts the bit rate of the video stream to match the end user's available bandwidth, as part of a partnership that the companies announced last October.

But Akamai's first-mover advantage ended in February with the general release of Microsoft's Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7) Service Pack 1 (SP1), which enabled other CDNs to deploy the technology in their own networks.

Since then, a number of service providers have begun installing and testing the new Silverlight capabilties, including AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), CDNetworks Co. Ltd. , Internap Network Services Corp. (Nasdaq: INAP), Level 3 Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: LVLT), and Limelight Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW).

Silverlight is also seeing increased interest from encoding vendors and digital rights management (DRM) suppliers.

On the encoding side, Digital Rapids Corp. , Envivio Inc. , Grab Networks Inc., Inlet Technologies Inc. , Rhozet Corp. , Telestream Inc., Vbrick Systems Inc. , ViewCast Corp. , and Winnov all offer support for Silverlight streaming.

DRM application service providers CDNetworks, BuyDRM, Entriq Inc. , ExtendMedia Inc. , Ipercast Inc., and iStreamPlanet Co. also support the Silverlight platform.