Microsoft’s Streaming Service Bureau
Before the advent of streaming video, major company-wide events were broadcast via satellite, or recorded for later distribution throughout the company via videotape or CD-ROM. The unit responsible for those earlier productions - now known as Microsoft Studios - today produces the bulk of streaming media at Microsoft. The transition was intuitive. "The Studios were not originally developed for streaming. But because they did so many of the big events that we started streaming with, a lot of the streaming services reside here," Aldridge says. "But now we're starting to see a lot of decentralized efforts to create content."
Today, Microsoft Studios produces, encodes and hosts more than 60 presentations per month for various business and product units within Microsoft.
While Microsoft Studios still produces global marketing events with budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars - such as the worldwide launch of Windows 2000 - most of the three to five presentations produced every day at the Studios in Seattle are budgeted in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. And while it does not sell services to the outside world, the unit is held to business principles that govern the open market. "We have an internal rate card that's pretty competitive with outside rates. We're actually running a business inside this corporation," Carlisle says. "The minimum expectation is for us to be cost neutral to the corporation, and we are succeeding in that goal."
In the same vein, Microsoft business units that want to produce streaming content are not mandated to use Microsoft Studios. "What we're seeing now is groups within the company starting to do their own things," Aldridge observes. "In some cases they're using Studios, and in other cases they're outsourcing."
Typically, a Microsoft business or product group works with Microsoft Studios to design a streaming presentation that fits the goals of the group. "We usually have a project manager that we insert into the process, because it's really a poor use of most people's time to create media," Carlisle says. "They have other things that they could be doing, like creating software."
MITT, the Enabler
The most common production scenario for the Studios involves working with video and PowerPoint slides. "It's our job to put those two together in a synchronous environment and put it in a shell to be posted to the corporate network or to the Internet," Carlisle says.
With its services in high demand, Microsoft Studios soon found itself in need of a tool to streamline the production of these presentations. The Studios set out to create one, and those efforts yielded the Microsoft Interactive Training Tool (MITT). "Basically, [MITT] is an interactive shell," Carlisle says. "On one side you have a dynamic table of contents. We sync the table of contents to the PowerPoint presentation and to the streaming video file. You can scroll through and select a location, and it'll put up the right slide and go to the right place in the video and start to stream it."
"Twelve months ago, I would rarely, if ever, get a call from a customer at a Fortune 500 company about streaming, and I really wouldn't get that many calls from Microsoft salespeople either now I get calls daily."
Today, companies wanting to emulate the functionality of MITT in a Windows Media environment must develop their own templates using script commands — a process beyond the capabilities of most non-programmers. But engineers and product managers in Redmond are developing Windows Media Producer — a new application announced by Steve Ballmer at Streaming Media West — which will extend MITT's capabilities and bring them to corporate desktops. "One of the things that we've always tried to do at Microsoft is take technologies and work with them to mature them into robust and reliable services that anybody, anywhere in the world can use," Carlisle says.
That said, however, Matthias is quick to point out that the concepts behind MITT are not exactly rocket science. "It doesn't take a studio like [MS Studios] to make this work," he says. "The challenge is in replicating content, getting it close to the user, and making sure everybody knows where it is. Not everything needs to be done high end."
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