Another erratic take on the exciting world of Enterprise Video!!  Read how I predicted trends that came to fruition, the right and wrong of how 2009 became a “banner” year for our industry in the Enterprise:

2009 - A Banner Year

The basic concept most enterprise organizations fail to acknowledge is that, as with any documentation or resource they use to communicate or to perform the organization’s day-to-day business, streaming media is in itself a digital record, and it is critical content that needs to be archived and kept relevant for future business efforts. And with media assets that bring to life the spirit of an all-staff meeting or that show a sales team how dynamic a speaker was when presenting a product or a service to a new prospect, we have the essence and the spirit of that success to reflect and build on. It’s also where we can evaluate our flaws in brilliant color and sound with supporting materials, feedback, and relevant metrics.

Read full article here

IIS Live Smooth Streaming

David Nelson takes us on a walk through of IIS Live Smooth Streaming now in Beta.   IIS Live Smooth Streaming enables adaptive streaming of live events to Microsoft Silverlight clients and is an extension for Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 – it delivers compelling, uninterrupted live video streams that allegedly instantly adjust quality (bit rate) to match changing network and CPU conditions at the client.

I am very curious to see how this is going to work when Enterprise end users hit on an IIS 7 video that is Smooth streaming – fat live video pumping over HTTP into a locked down network, sounds like the kind of bandwidth consumption that could bring systems down… especially when systems are cloaked, how is the intelligence of the smooth streaming going to work for video coming in to the Enterprise from the outside?

The following prerequisites must be fulfilled to install IIS Live Smooth Streaming – Beta:

• You must use IIS 7.0 running on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista® with Service Pack 1 (SP1).
• To manage IIS Live Smooth Streaming using the IIS Manager user interface, the IIS Management Console for IIS must be installed. You can install the IIS Management Console role service for Web Server (IIS) in Server Manager.

The following options are available for installing IIS Live Smooth Streaming - Beta:

• Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta
• Web Platform Installer 1.0
• Windows Installer files (for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista SP1 operating systems)

The “Installation Notes” section of the IIS Live Smooth Streaming – Beta Readme contains detailed instructions for each of these installation options.

Read the entire post

Here is an interesting thread from the WMTALK LIST:

For Live Smooth Streaming today, you've got just three products announced.

Inlet Spinnaker (with a forthcoming update) ENCODES
Windows Server 2008 (with Live Smooth Streaming module for IIS7) HOSTS
Silverlight 2+ CONSUMES

A live encoder basically pushes the same chunks the server would deliver to the
client to the server, with some extra metadata and stuff.  So the file format is
still Fragmented MPEG-4.  Supported codecs are:
        VC-1 and WMA 10 Pro for Silverlight 2+
        H.264 and AAC-LC for Silverlight 3+

Ben Waggoner
Principal Video Strategist, Silverlight
Microsoft Corporation

Compression Blog: on10.net/blogs/benwagg/
Compression Classes at Stanford and PSU: tinyurl.com/benwaggclasses

-----Original Message-----
From: WMTalk [mailto:WMTalk@DISCUSSMS.HOSTING.LSOFT.COM] On Behalf Of Harry
Emerson
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2009 7:32 AM
To: WMTalk@DISCUSSMS.HOSTING.LSOFT.COM
Subject: Live Smooth Streaming: Goesinto & Goesoutta

Hi All,

I've read a bunch now about Live Smooth Streaming, and there's chatter about
mpeg4, H.264, etc., but I'm still confused about who does what to whom. If
anyone can help put the pieces together, that would be nice. What I'd like
to understand better right now is the goesinta and goesoutta formats for
each piece

WME9
EE2 SP1
IIS7
WMS/2008
Silverlight Player
WMP (v11?)

Starting points:
EE2 SP1: what input formats does it accept? What will it output to IIS7
(e.g., native mpeg4, a proprietary format, etc.)? What will it output to
WMS/2008? Will it output directly to a Silverlight player (and if so, in
what formats)? Will it output directly to a WMP?

WME9: we're probably familiar enough with input formats, and we know it will
output to WMS/2008 and to WMP 11 in a proprietary ASF format. Will it output
to an IIS7 publishing point? Will it output directly to a Silverlight
player?

IIS7: for a Live publishing point: what input formats will it accept (e.g.,
only a proprietary format from EE2?)? What are the output formats (e.g.,
only the .ismv chunked up smooth streaming file format?)?

WMS/2008: I'm guessing there's not much change. I assume it will accept
input from EE2, but not EE2 smooth streaming?  I also assume the output is
the same (wma/wmv in an asf wrapper that can be digested by Silverlight or
WMP?)?

Silverlight: I think I understand that it can receive a million little
chunks of a video as miniscule progressive downloads from IIS7 Live Smooth
Streaming. Can it also receive that from WMS/2008? Will it accept other
input formats like mp3, mpeg4, etc. (I mean, in native mode, not in
programmer-hell mode -- meaning, can I just point an mp3 stream at it?)?

Maybe some of these answers should be obvious to me.... I'm also hoping to
learn of interplay between these systems and the broader ecosystem out
there.  In particular streaming live and on-demand audio and video to the
wealth of smart phones that don't support Windows Media, the iPhone in
particular. For me, reaching that market is mandatory.

Thanks,

Harry

Harry Emerson
SurferNETWORK

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The first installment of this series discussed where your effort falls on the scale between Class of Service vs. Level of Effort.

In this installment  we discuss where NOT to make cuts and why!  I started writing this series in response to the sheer repetition of the questions I am being asked from clients new and old, who are suddenly stricken with a desire or notion of branching off into some kind of amorphous new media, interactive project:

• How much will it cost?
  

  NO MORE BUDGET HACKING!

I kick off the conversation they same way I always have, targeting the 3 buckets of information I need ‘to fill’, in order to kick-off a basic requirements gathering session.
- What is the product you want to develop and why?
- What are your goals? What is this product supposed to achieve?
- Budget: Do you have a budget and how long can the effort be sustained, as is, today.  (And how do you plan on getting additional funding if required, where is the ROI coming from)

These are the 3 primary threads of conversation that support the skeleton of a plan that I need to give an estimate.  of course, I rarely ever get a straight answer to anything I ask, usually I get an email that says something like:

• “Don’t worry about what it is, I just need a price…. It’s Facebook for the Enterprise”
  
• “We can’t even start thinking about getting a budget until we know what the budget needs to be… It’s a pay-per-view mobile video app for iPhone.  You know the deal!”
• “I just want to know how much it’ll cost to build out a platform for video on steroids with tweets” Hey, this isn’t Holly’weird, give me some information I can use!And then I am asked to give up a number or a “guesstimate”.
  

  … This is where the average PM gets thrown off the track (or under the bus) – the prospects do not want to commit to the real number at the start of a venture with the financial climate the way it is, yet on the developer side every one wants to get the contract and is willing to take cuts in order to get that signature, the commitment to pay.  You will spend a good deal of time, unless you keep something handy that you can just re-purpose (which is of course what I do having worked on so many projects by now) – at this point it is extremely important to keep the requirements and needs of the project in focus – if you are the client, I will not haggle and if you are the PM on another project, don’t let a client drive you!

  Stay focused on what you MUST have in order to have a successful relationship with a client and a successful product at launch.  Do not confuse the product with the project.  I will get into the differences in more detail in a separate installment, however this is where you as client or PM are setting the TONE for how the project will be executed and setting the level of expectation on what will be delivered.

  

  Plan it out now

  Budget Hackers usually target two areas – the two most important task related streams of effort on any project:

  • Project Planning:

  Why do you need 300 hours for Planning?

  I should not even have to explain why this would take three times that amount, but clients these days usually feel that planning should be free or take just a couple of hours – when all hell breaks loose and the fingers start wagging, everyone will ask why things went wrong?  A key ingredient of the Planning phase is requirements gathering and building out the scope of the project – these are all documents that need to be signed, reviewed by lawyers depending on the scale of the project and agreed on by all parties.

  More planning leads to better planning and better, fluid processes that have been fully rationalized are then put in place.  To get multiple teams on the same page takes time, resources and a lot of administration on the Project Managers part to get everyone aligned and resources allocated before the project begins.  A poorly organized project will result in a poor product.  Do the math and you will see it is worth the additional bucket of hours for human time to get it done correctly – Unless you plan to fail.

  • Quality Assurance testing:

  Why do you need 120 hours for QA?

  Quality Assurance testing happens over time and is a responsive, team effort – as we ready a product for launch we will find issues along the way.  Every step forward needs to be done very carefully, needs to be documented and then tested, reviewed and approved.

  During QA, the developer will attempt to correct issues as they arise and then the tests begin again.  If you do not have a QA team doing the testing, the bug reports will come from the clients, and that is not only embarrassing but deeply diminishes the odds for survival of a new product.

  Something as simple as changing the header navigation on a single page, if it wasn’t planned for, can cause a lot of extra effort and will leave the final product vulnerable to bad exposure if it isn’t handled correctly after the decision to make a change has been issued.  New media applications have multiple feeds of information and administration that will need to be upheld after the product is launched and thriving – this living creature needs to be feed or it will just stop!  QA also helps the PM help the owner of the new product rationalize what long-term resources s/he will require to keep a successful site going and scale it out as needed.

  If you are planning on making that first big step, you need to be prepared to learn the language and let the experts do their job…  Let me know your thoughts!

  Leave a commment below.
  

  

  More valuable insights to come in future up-dates in this series on Budget Hacking and New Media Planning – the next installment will discuss the “Blended Rate” and how this can work for you to keep costs down and quality high!

The newly released Accordent Multicast In-stream Technology is a “breakthrough that enables large organizations to leverage multicast-enabled networks to deliver high-quality streaming video with synchronized slides and graphics as a single, compressed stream. “ I was contacted by the team at Accordent and led through an early demo with my old pal Mike Lorenz, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer (& fellow streaming media All-Star)!The premise is simple, in the Enterprise environment resources are stretched and pushed to the limits – conservation and optimization are key words on every IT leaders hot list. This latest release appears in the Accordent PresenterPro (Accordent CaptureStation release expected in the next two weeks or so) is a huge value-add to the Enterprise conservation effort.

Accordent PresenterPro Workflow

The first thought that crossed my mind when I heard about this release, is that we would be doing a tour of new Silverlight functionality; however, this product is totally 100% Enterprise friendly and is built from the Microsoft Windows Media SDK. In fact, the encoder Mike used for this demo was the Windows Media Encoder 9 and the end user need only have their correctly configured Enterprise Windows Media Player installed on their workstation.

This technology is HOT!

The workflow has not changed – the only addition that is visible is within the Accordent Encoder Controller’s Windows Media tab – you will be easily able to customize bitrates that are now exposed for optimization which includes, in addition to the standard ‘script’ stream we are familiar with, a field that can be customized for the actual slides to transport.

This feature is obviously ideal if you are in a multicast enabled environment but it works just as easily with unicast streams.

The real magic happens when you start up the webcast and push that first slide. Mike graciously exposed the player properties as we went through the demo and this is how it went…

It looks like a normal webcast

What Mike had described as we observed the statistics on the windows media player was quite simple – a slide was pushed from the PresenterPro, and as we watched the statistics, a very graceful bandwidth peak occurred according the the bandwidth limits we set in the Encoder Controller (in real time) and then they went back down to the a/v streaming bandwidth.

It sounds so simple but it is brilliant – the ROI in an Enterprise can be measured easily if you do some simple math and of course, the larger the audience the greater the ROI.

In short, one slide is passed through the same multicast stream to the 15,000 audience members rather than 15,000 calls to a webserver for a jpg to load in the users browser. If that still doesn’t make sense and you are interested in the technology, read this.

Properties of the windows media player reveal the local cache call

The slide is sent directly into the local cache of the windows media player from within the single multicast stream.

The call is sent in real time, so if you change a slide or need to make updates, the slide will be pushed at that time – and I am assuming here, but it seems to make sense that would be the case.

Of course, there must be one draw back…

Enterprise player deployment & management IT will need to ensure the local cache options on the windows media player are enabled (depending on which version of the player is deployed) and everyone will need to remember to clear their caches once in a while, especially if they have a lot of live webcasts going on!

Enable Cache Options & Clear Regularly for a healthy Media Player!

All in all this is a fantastic release and I am very excited to see it in action and look forward to the ROI figures as they are calculated in actual use cases.

The official Press Release from Accordent will be posted here