New Kids in Town: Adobe Media Player and Microsoft Silverlight take online video into new territory

Alexander says that, in addition to a "richer, more compelling, more interactive user experience," Silverlight offers publishers "all the benefits of Windows Media," especially Windows Media streaming servers. In fact, at least at this time, Microsoft is really pushing the scalability and efficiency it claims it can offer for delivering content via pure streaming, though progressive downloads from web servers are also supported. "People sometimes only watch twenty seconds of a clip, but they end up downloading the whole thing [with progressive downloads]," Alexander says. "That’s not very efficient in terms of user experience and bandwidth usage." Alexander also reiterated one of the benefits of pure streaming: "Users should be able to go to whatever part in the video they want to watch without having to wait for the entire thing to download."

And, since so much content is already encoded in Windows Media Video (Microsoft’s version of the SMPTE VC-1 standard)—including the vast majority of archived broadcast content—Alexander says that delivering that content via Silverlight has the advantage of being backwards compatible with any publishers and content delivery networks that are already delivering Windows Media.

Finally Silverlight makes it much easier for publishers to present Windows Media content in user interfaces that are much more dynamic and interactive than the traditionally nondescript Windows Media Player. "We were able to do in roughly two weeks with Silverlight what it took us nearly eighteen months to develop on our own," says Justin Shaffer, SVP of new media at Major League Baseball Advanced Media. "But ultimately, the coolest user interfaces probably won’t even be developed by us. Giving people the toolset to create their own experiences is what’s going to be really exciting."

What’s Under the Hood?
Silverlight represents a holistic approach to online video, using Expression Media to tie together Expression Blend (formerly Interactive Designer) and Expression Design (formerly Graphic Designer) with Expression Media Encoder, a batch encoding tool that can run on either the desktop or Windows Server.

Expression Media Encoder offers both live and on-demand encoding (from many different formats including AVI and QuickTime into WMV) as part of a single tool. More importantly, Alexander says, the encoder enables template-based publishing in Silverlight, meaning producers can take content and publish it using, for example, a "nightly news" template, for both PC and Mac users. When combined with a Tarari hardware-assisted Encoder Accelerator, Expression Media Encoder offers significant encoding speed gains over software-only encoding, Alexander says.

Perhaps most impressive about Expression Media Encoder, however, is its UI, which includes a preview function that allows users to look at a sample of the encoded video side-by-side (or top-to-bottom) with the original video—before the clip has actually been encoded—by splitting the frame down or across the middle, with the original video on one side and the preview video on the other. "It looks fantastic," Steve Mack wrote on StreamingMedia.com. "It’s the update we’ve been waiting for for years."

Finally, Microsoft claims that the upcoming Longhorn server offers twice the scalability on the same hardware when compared to Windows Server 2003.

Bumps in the Road
Both Adobe and Microsoft are clearly looking to expand their video ecosystems—Microsoft into the browser and Adobe away from it (though both companies insist they’re not abandoning their commitment to the areas in which they’ve already carved out their niche). And, needless to say, each company faces a different set of challenges.

For Microsoft, there’s the perception that the company essentially dismissed Mac users when it began relying on the third-party Flip4Mac to provide Windows Media support on Macs. "I’m sure there will be skeptics [about Microsoft’s ability to deliver a solution that works equally well on both platforms]," says Akamai’s Napoleon. "There’s the legacy issue, the religious issue of Mac vs. PC. But Microsoft is taking this very seriously, because they realize they need to play well in both arenas."

There’s also the fact that Microsoft has admittedly lagged in video development. "To me, Silverlight is purely playing catch-up to Flash," says Nick Rockwell, chief technology officer of MTV Networks. "It does seem to plug the holes that have so severely hampered Windows Media Video and Windows Media Player and given Flash the opportunity it has enjoyed: cross-platform or cross-browser consistency and support for overlays and complex UI integration."