InfoQ

InfoQ

News

My Bookmarks

Login or Register to enable bookmarks for unlimited time.

The content has been bookmarked!

There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.

Microsoft Closes Down Silverlight Streaming

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Nov 01, 2009

Sections
Development,
Enterprise Architecture
Topics
SaaS ,
.NET ,
Silverlight
Tags
Streaming Video

Microsoft has closed its two-year-old hosting service, Silverlight Streaming. Existing videos can still be retrieved for the time being, but new ones can no longer be uploaded. They have also discontinued the related publishing plug-in for Expression Encoder.

Silverlight Streaming, formally known as Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ Beta, was established in May of 2007 to promote Silverlight’s media capabilities. It offered free hosting for streaming videos that worked in conjunction with Silverlight.

Earlier this year Microsoft dropped another online service, PopFly. While neither service formally left its beta phase, a lot of time and energy was invested by people using these services. This brings into question Microsoft’s commitment to its other online offerings, especially the free ones under the Windows Live brand.

Windows Azure is expected to offer streaming video hosting, but it will not be a direct replacement for Silverlight Streaming. Unlike Silverlight Streaming, it will also be a paid offering.

For more information on the closing of this service and instructions on retrieving your files from it, consult the Live Services blog.

long name? by Brian Edwards Posted
Video Optimization Webcasting & Bandwidth: how many viewers can you reach? by Jitender Kumar Posted
  1. Back to top

    long name?

    by Brian Edwards

    Maybe it is because they named it "Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ Beta" and it was too hard search for. They also forgot to add '2010 Ultimate Edition'

  2. Back to top

    Video Optimization Webcasting & Bandwidth: how many viewers can you reach?

    by Jitender Kumar

    Web casting, or broadcasting over the internet, is a media file (audio-video mostly) distributed over the internet using streaming media technology. Streaming implies media played as a continuous stream and received real time by the browser (end user). Streaming technology enables a single content source to be distributed to many simultaneous viewers. Streaming video bandwidth is typically calculated in gigabytes of data transferred. It is important to estimate how many viewers you can reach, for example in a live webcast, given your bandwidth constraints or conversely, if you are expecting a certain audience size, what bandwidth resources you need to deploy.

    To estimate how many viewers you can reach during a webcast, consider some parlance:
    One viewer: 1 click of a video player button at one location logged on
    One viewer hour: 1 viewer connected for 1 hour
    100 viewer hours: 100 viewers connected for 1 hour…

    Typically webcasts will be offered at different bit rates or quality levels corresponding to different user’s internet connection speeds. Bit rate implies the rate at which bits (basic data units) are transferred. It denotes how much data is transmitted in a given amount of time. (bps / Kbps / Mbps…). Quality improves as more bits are used for each second of the playback. Video of 3000 Kbps will look better than one of say 1000Kbps. This is just like quality of a image is represented in resolution, for video (or audio) it is measured by the bit rate.

Educational Content

New-age Transactional Systems - Not Your Grandpa's OLTP

John Hugg discusses high volume transaction processing applications with high and low frequency profiles, and how VoltDB can be used for that purpose.

Cool Code

Kevlin Henney examines code samples to see what can be learned from them starting from the premise that one won’t write great code unless he knows how to read it.

Collaboration: At the Extremities of Extreme

Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.

Yesod Web Framework

Michael Snoyman presents Yesod, a web framework written in Haskell and containing a web server, templating, ORM, libraries (templating, gravatar, etc.).

Transactions without Transactions

Richard Kreuter and Kyle Banker on how to avoid classical RDBMS transactional systems by using compensation mechanisms, transactional messaging or transactional procedures.

Attila Szegedi on JVM and GC Performance Tuning at Twitter

Attila Szegedi talks about performance tuning Java and Scala programs at Twitter: how to approach GC problems, the importance of asynchronous I/O, when to use MySQL/Cassandra/Redis, and much more.

10 tips on how to prevent business value risk

One category of risk that project teams need to ensure they address is business value failure – delivering a product that fails to provide value for the business investor.

Interview: Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives

InfoQ spoke to the authors of Software Systems Architecture on a couple of new topics, the System Context viewpoint and Agile, which have been added to the second edition.