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MTV & Silverlight 3 at NAB 2009

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NAB 2009 rocked !!

It was exhausting working the booth, standing on my feet all day, talking to so many people over the course of four days, but it was so exciting at the same time. We showed many cool things at the Microsoft booth, including Silverlight 3, IIS 7 Smooth Streaming, our Fast search engine, our Advertising solutions, a ton of solutions from our partners, and last but not the least – some very interesting open source starter kits that my team built, and that I will blog about in coming posts.

But I am especially excited about a specific application I was directly involved in.

Viacom/MTV announced a web based Digital Asset Management Workflow application completely built in Silverlight 3 (of course using the beta bits for now) and .Net 3.5. This is very cool, not just because it is an early adoption of Silverlight 3, but because :

- It is a great proof point that Silverlight is not just for consumer facing scenarios on the web, but is equally suited for more rigorous applications in broadcast media workflow.

- It is one of the first production applications to use the h.264 playback capabilities being enabled in Silverlight 3. MTV creates all their proxies as QuickTime .mov files, with the essence encoded using h.264 compression, either in SD or in HD resolutions. Since QT is essentially a variant of the MP4 container structure, and SL 3 supports parsing MP4 and decoding h.264 natively, we could playback all of MTV’s QT content natively in SL3, without any further transcoding. This was a huge win-win for all involved both from a time and cost perspective.

I provided some of the necessary technology guidance to a joint team from Microsoft, Vertigo and MTV in implementing the solution.

You can read more about the general press release from Viacom CIO Joe Simon here and about the specific case study here.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2009
    PingBack from http://www.anith.com/?p=32922

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2009
    My colleague Jit Ghosh just wrote about the very cool Silverlight 3 application that a team from MTV,

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2009
    My colleague Jit Ghosh just wrote about the very cool Silverlight 3 application that a team from MTV

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2009
    So, is it possible to play a H.264 encoded FLV from SL3 ?