Silverlight Powering Wimbledon 2009 Delivery in HD

For those who have not seen it, Silverlight is powering NBC Sports coverage of Wimbledon 2009. You can check out the player features developed by another terrific Silverlight partner, IStreamPlanet. The player is set up to allow you to watch the various courts at your selection, and to fast forward, rewind, and even instant replay on live feeds. NBC even provides highlights and all the day's footage in case you missed the action.

Thanks to Mio and the crew for a great application, and NBCSports for the great content!

More Silverlight applications

It's always a great feeling to surf the web and see partners pull together great experiences with the technology we help to create. While I always get asked if Microsoft is using Silverlight (the answer is yes, we have over 200+ applications on our own Microsoft.com and MSN.com properties), it's a testament to the explosive growth and the technology itself when you start seeing it show up more frequently in your casual day to day web experiences.

We blogged about this on our team site, but in case you haven't seen it, Nasa has released some footage from the International Space Station and on the Mars Science Lab. These applications use Photosynth, and they demonstrates the power that can be achieved when trying to deliver high resolution images, while also providing the ability to quickly navigate and manipulate large amounts of image data.

The second is the Country Music Awards, as they too have used Deepzoom to manipulate over 850+ images from the Country Music Awards show this week that users have submitted.

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Netflix and Media Center, and HD video

Today our friends in our Entertainment and Devices group announced that Netflix would be available in Windows Media Center. This is great for Silverlight, as this means that the Silverlight application will now be hosted in Windows Media Center.

There have been lots of blogging and announcements here, but the important thing that this denotes is that this continues to re-affirm our companies commitment to use Silverlight. Silverlight has only been out over 18 months and with over 200+ applications on Microsoft.com and MSN.com alone, we are continuing our momentum and growing market penetration which is great for all the designers and developers out there. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of downloads in the market already (in such short amount of time) thanks in part to our own properties and also those of our partners (like Netflix, Blockbuster, CBS, NBC, HSN, AOL, and many others).

One we just launched was EBay to create an auction item tracker in IE8 that allows you to track auctions in real time from within the browser. SL3 is now in beta and we have seen tremendous demand since our announcements at Mix and NAB. The launch of our Smooth Streaming (click here for a demo of 1080p playback) technology at NAB and the ability to "really" do HD video reliably with PVR over HTTP has helped to drive Silverlight mind share and I would say that the remainder of this year and 2010 will be really great for Silverlight and HD video on the net. Thanks to all of you who are making it happen.

Facebook API's and Brian Goldfarb

I had to post this video of our wise and fearless marketing leader Brian Goldfarb demonstrating the power of Silverlight and WPF at the Facebook conference (per my blog below). Courtesy of Rafe Needleman



Microsoft shows off Facebook Open Stream API demos from Rafe Needleman on Vimeo.

Facebook API's and Silverlight

We demonstrated some very interesting integration with Windows, WPF and Silverlight with Facebooks new Open Stream API's. We participated in thier developer event yesterday to demonstrate some of the integration that could be achieved between MS and Facebook.

We released more detail on our team blog but needless to say we are not standing still and will be providing more info and detail on our plans here shortly. Here is a snip of some of the info from our blog:

Microsoft and Facebook have been working together since 2007 via the Facebook Developer Toolkit – a first of its kind open source solution to help developers integrate into and build applications for Facebook users. If you are building an application for the web, desktop, or mobile, and want to make it social and integrate it with Facebook, we will provide the tools and resources you need to create visually stunning, cutting edge applications faster than ever before.



At the event, we gave an early look at what will be possible by demonstrating canonical applications built with Silverlight and .NET. First we showed a Windows application, built with WPF, that shows the power of what .NET and Windows has to offer, via caching and sync, incredible performance, feed integration, automatic docking and adaptive UI, taskbar integration, search and more. The second was a Web application, built with Silverlight, that shows feed integration, profile exploring, and an incredible DeepZoom-based image viewing

experience with unique UX constructs for viewing large amounts of feed and friends-related photographic data. We will continue to build out these apps and will also ship the sourcecode in the future.

NAB 2009, Deepzoompix.com

Yesterday @ NAB here in Las Vegas we announced release of our Smooth Streaming technology. Smooth Streaming is a feature of our Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services and we announced several key customers that are currently implementing it. Customers like NBC Sports for the Olympics in 2010, HSN, RIA, TV2, and CTV. Smooth Streaming is key to video delivery and provides minimal buffering and fast start up time, and allows the Silverlight player to work efficiently over HTTP to adapt the quality of the video stream in real time, based upon the consumer’s changing bandwidth, CPU utilization and frame rates.

Media companies can take advantage of Smooth Streaming features to boost advertising and subscription revenues by using true high-definition (HD) video (1080p) with uninterrupted delivery to extend viewing times. Smooth Streaming takes advantage of existing HTTP infrastructure and brings scale to media experiences delivered using HTTP.

We also showcased Akamai's Adaptive Edge, which is thier implementation of Smooth Streaming offered in a complete managed service for thier customers.

Several other CDN's announced support for Smooth Streaming: AT&T, Internap Network Services Corp., Level 3 Communications LLC and Limelight Networks Inc., as well as encoding product vendors including Digital Rapids, Envivio Inc., Grab Networks Inc. (Anystream), Inlet Technologies, Rhozet, Telestream Inc., VBrick Systems Inc., ViewCast Corp. and Winnov Inc., have all announced products and services supporting Smooth Streaming

We are also showcasing all of this in our booth (if you are here check it out in the South Hall, L720).

We also announced a new photo sharing service built in Silverlight and taking heavy advantage of Deepzoom. It's called Deepzoompix.com, and allows you to easily upload, or import photos from popular sharing services like Flickr and then display them quickly as a deepzoom collection.

Introducing a new Silverlight Team Blog

I am happy to post that we have started a Silverlight Team blog which members of our marketing team have agreed to champion. We have a lot of people that work on Silverlight from marketing, business development, development, test, and other sister teams that contribute to the product. We will have various members of the Silverlight team posting here (including yours truly) so hope you will find the information valuable.

I will continue to post here on my own blog the things that I think are relevant to the Silverlight business and may time and time again refer to the team blog when appropriate.