August 25th, 2008

Updated: Democratic National Convention site requires Silverlight and Move

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:31 pm

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Plug-in, Democratic National Convention, Move, Ryan Stewart

There was a lot of buzz around the fact that Silverlight was going to be use at the Democratic national convention for video (my post here) and off the heels of the Olympics, it seemed like a good thing for Microsoft to get into and I was really looking forward to a good RIA experience for the convention. The application was built by Hard Rock Deep Zoom demo. With a great agency that can show off the technology, it seems odd to me to add Move to the mix.

Update: Got a note from Eric Schmidt, Director Media and Advertising Evangelis about the Move plugin:

The DNCC chose to use Move as a means to tackle their live high definition streaming needs. The Move install is part of any Move experience (Silverlight or Flash).

We are leveraging Move’s CMS system to manage content and Level 3’s CDN infrastructure to deliver the video to the Silverlight player. The Move “plugin” hands video frames to Silverlight for compositing, etc.

Last year Microsoft and Move announced a partnership which would allow Silverlight content to be used on top of Move’s dynamic streaming technology. At the time I didn’t think the Move plugin would be required, but if they’re using that for the DNC site then it looks like it will be required. Or this could be a helper to Move to get more plugin distribution.

Anyone have more info on the reason or purpose of the Move plugin?

August 18th, 2008

NBA looking to stream live games

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:09 pm

Categories: Advertising, Online Video, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, User Interface

Tags: Web, NBA, Channel Management, Games, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Marketing, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Ryan Stewart

Rich media on the internet could be getting another big win if the NBA decides to go through with its plan to stream games to people in local markets. The NBA isn’t the first sports league to stream live games, MLB offers a streaming package and the NFL is going to stream some of their national games that are slated for NBC, but this is the first time that local games would be streamed. Traditionally local games are the crown jewels of local television stations because they’ve basically got a monopoly.

Just as with the Olympics, this could be an interesting experiment to see how a blend of traditional media and new media can affect ratings. As we saw with the Olympics, traditional media still rules the advertising roost. It draws the most viewers, it pulls in the most money, and it isn’t going away any time soon. But increasingly content seems to be moving to a “consume it how you want it” model where big content creators (if you can attach that term to the NBA) offer a variety of ways to consume content. I’ve called these “touch points” in the past but always talked about them in terms of the web. Now big media companies are getting into the touch point game.

In the end, this kind of thing is great for the web. It’s the first step in blending the TV and web experiences. A lot of people focus on interactive TV as a next step, but it seems to be moving more in the web direction. People like their TV the way it is, but with the technologies on the web, you can create that interactive content and increase the granularity of your analytics. I think the web-based TV experience will end up being superior than the general TV experience because of RIAs and better data. Keeping it on the big screen is still important but ultimately the web provides better platforms with which to make the most out of video content. I hope other sports leagues follow suit.

April 29th, 2008

Silverlight going to be all over the Democratic National Convention

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:35 am

Categories: Microsoft, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Content Provider, Rich Internet Application, Microsoft Corp., Democratic National Convention, Ryan Stewart

Yesterday Microsoft became the “official software and HD web content provider” for the 2008 Democratic National Convention. I’m not entirely sure what the software part entails, but the HD web content provider means that we’ll be seeing a lot of Silverlight content coming out of the DNC. In fact, Silverlight will help provide live coverage of the event, one which I think should be well viewed considering the state of the Democratic race. As Larry notes, Google is the official “innovation provider” for the Republican National Convention in February.

One cool bit which I haven’t been able to get a lot of extra information on is the fact that Microsoft is providing the technology behind real-time online voting systems. Is that going to be a WPF application? Will it be using Windows Communication Foundation?

One thing Microsoft does a pretty good job of is showing off good looking rich media demos. The DNC will be a good place to do that. I’ll update the post but I’m really curious which agency will be working on the end user application. As an RIA fan, I think this could be a good way to show of a high quality RIA experience to mainstream users. Maybe even more so than the Olympics because of the data involved in a political convention.

April 28th, 2008

Unknown Vector now has browser-based version of uvLayer

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:50 pm

Categories: Flash, Rich Media

Tags:

A couple of weeks ago uvLayer (original writeup), one of my favorite AIR applications because of the visual effects and collaborative features, released an in-browser version that anyone can go and use. uvLayer is an interesting case because it started out as a desktop application and then they took that code and created the in-browser version of it to make it more accessible to a wider range of folks. You get most of the functionality from the AIR version but the AIR application incorporates native windows and allows you to “pop out” the video experience very easily.

In addition, uvLayer has been translated into 13 languages. When you log in, if you’re not a fan of Flashy sites, you probably won’t be too fond of uvLayer. It’s a visual plethora of video and it can seem a bit overwhelming at first but they have a lot of features that I really like. It integrates instantly with Facebook so you can pull all of your Facebook friends using uvLayer and get an instant community. Once you’ve got the instant community set up uvLayer makes the entire video experience interactive and collaborative. You can create sets and then share them with friends. Then you can see what your friends are watching as it happens so you can quickly jump to videos. With a lot of friends you can be the first to get a sense of when a video is getting a lot of viral interest.

For media junkies, this is a great application and it’s a fun way to watch video over the web. It definitely isn’t for everyone but I think the YouTube crowd will appreciate the subtleties enough to give it some traction.

April 14th, 2008

More money pouring into rich media; Move Networks adds more funding

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:11 pm

Categories: Online Video, Rich Media

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Network, Media, Video, Microsoft Corp., Plug-in, Move Networks, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Update: Couple of corrections/clarifications. The Move’s total funding is $67.9 million, not $91.3 million, thanks to Dan Rayburn for the tip. Also, I thought this was implied, but Move will be using Silverlight as a way to distribute video, so Silverlight gets the adaptive streaming and Move gets more penetration. Thanks to Don for the comment.

Move Networks is announcing that they’ve raised a $46 million C round today from a variety of interesting companies including Cisco and Comcast Interactive Media. Move has gained a lot of ground as a high definition delivery mechanism for ABC.com and others. One of the things that makes Move interesting is the ability to change the bitrate of the streamed content based on how much bandwidth is available to the person watching the stream. They partnered with Microsoft around that feature so that Silverlight could take advantage of it.

The downside to Move is that they require their own browser plugin in order to view content. I haven’t seen any kind of penetration numbers for the plugin but the company says it reaches 6.5 million people a month. Not a huge number when you consider the number of people on the web but they’re definitely doing a number of things right when it comes to HD video.

I think Move helped paved the way for HD video and has been great for the web. It’s encouraged companies like Adobe and Microsoft to be better about their HD offerings and because it’s been laser focused on one thing, video, it’s been able to innovate. I’m not sure what will happen in the long run as both Adobe and Microsoft keep getting better, but with a total of $91.3 million raised, they’ve got a big warchest.

April 14th, 2008

Widevine and Microsoft team up for DRM on Silverlight

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:39 pm

Categories: Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Team, Microsoft Silverlight, Content Provider, Digital-rights Management, Microsoft Corp., Widevine, Media World, Digital Rights Management (DRM), Digital Media, Security

Microsoft has its own kind of DRM in Silverlight which is based on the DRM found in Windows Media but it sounds like they’re also working with Widevine to Silverlight-enable their Cypher service which also works with Flash and the On2 codec.

In general, I don’t think this is a huge deal, but it is interesting. Widevine has gotten quite a bit of funding and is placing itself squarely in the middle of content providers and the technologies that would enable distribution. In some ways they’re looking to be a Switzerland of DRM in which they can offer a DRM solution that the content providers would support on any platform they want to use, Flash, Silverlight, whatever. One thing that Widevine appears to do very well is work with studios.

Adobe announced it’s own DRM for Flash Video earlier this year and I’m not sure if we’ve worked with Widevine since that announcement at all. The previous Flash DRM support was through On2 and not Adobe as I understood it. Is the role of a 3rd party DRM solution a good one for content providers and consumers?

The rich media world is heating up from all angles.

March 12th, 2008

Sprout the easy-peasy Flash editor launches to the masses

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:12 pm

Categories: Adobe Engage, Flash, Flex, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Rich Widgets

Tags: Asset Management, Corporate Communications, Productivity, Operational Planning, Business Operations, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Update: Had the wrong video for a bit, should be fixed now. Sorry about that.

Sprout, one of the coolest Flex applications I’ve seen recently has opened their doors so that anyone can sign up. They “launched” at Demo and they also presented at Engage. They initially let in about 5,00 beta testers and after a pretty short beta period have decided the application is ready for prime time.

I blogged earlier about Sprout and I’m still a huge fan of the service. It takes Flash content and puts it into the hands of basically everyone. You won’t start cranking out sophisticated rich Internet applications with Sprout but it’s a powerful tool for building widgets and other interactive content with a simple interface. I think Sprout also does a great job of showing off the diversity of Adobe’s platform. You can incorporate your video, animations, graphical assets, voice and even documents all in one SWF that can be seen by basically everyone.

Cote’ and I sat down with Carnet Williams at Engage to talk about Sprout. That interview is below.

March 9th, 2008

A look back at MIX 2008

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:10 pm

Categories: Adobe, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Mobile, Video, Microsoft Corp., Alistair Croll, MIX, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Alistair Croll has a post up about his impressions of MIX and talks a bit about Microsoft’s “three front war”. In general, it’s a pretty good post that encompasses everything Microsoft is doing. And I think it’s very interesting just how deeply the RIA space is running through Microsoft. It’s part of their devices, it’s part of their core software, it’s part of their continuing enterprise aspirations and it’s part of their general purpose web stuff. Microsoft has always been able to provide very powerful experiences and now they’re looking at ways to provide a well-designed, powerful experience across their properties. Also, thanks to Kendall Whitehouse for the pictures.

And with that context, now is a good time to go back and look at MIX from my RIA perspective. I think coming out of MIX there are three main themes; the progress of Silverlight, video, and mobile devices. The first thing that’s impressive when you step back and look at it is how far along Silverlight has come in a relatively short period of time. If we consider Flash the standard, Silverlight has gained a ton of ground feature-wise in the past year. So it’s clear there is a lot of talent and drive on the team. What interests me most as an Adobe employee is to see where that goes now that we’re closer to feature parity. Will Silverlight and Flash actually diverge as the companies move in different directions with different goals?

One example of this was the incredible amount of video on display at MIX. Because of the video-centric focus on Silverlight 1.0, that wasn’t too surprising but if you step back it wasn’t so much about video as it was about the infrastructure behind video. Microsoft has talked a lot about this being the last “format” war for digital media because content will be streamed instead of put on physical media. The video announcements and features at MIX - things like adaptive streaming - are a good example of Microsoft laying the groundwork for next generation, high quality content on the web. And Silverlight provides a pretty good engine.

The last part was mobile and this also plays to the video story. We didn’t see any video on Silverlight mobile in the keynote at MIX but you’d have to assume it’s coming. Microsoft has a very big mobile ecosystem with things like Windows Mobile on devices but also the Zune. Could you someday build Zune applications with Silverlight? That would be a pretty compelling platform for developers weighing the Apple stack versus the Microsoft stack. Then when you think about all of the tie-ins with XNA and how those might interop down the road it gets even more interesting.

Maybe it’s because I’m at SXSW so I’m getting touchy-feely but after thinking about it and digesting it for a couple of days I’m beginning to wonder if the Adobe/Microsft stuff is overblown. Clearly we’re going to compete for designers, always a hot topic, and the development platform battle is in full swing, but neither one of these two platforms is going away any time soon. Flash isn’t dying and Silverlight won’t be either, especially in the context of Microsoft’s wider ecosystem. So while clearly there is a lot at stake, Microsoft has a lot of competitors in this world and Silverlight seems to play a big part in all of those arenas.

March 5th, 2008

MIX08 keynote rundown

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:18 pm

Categories: Expression Studio, Microsoft, Online Video, Ooyala, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., Silverlight Penetration, Productivity, Business Structures, Advertising & Promotion, AJAX, Finance, Marketing, Internet

I was at the Microsoft MIX08 keynote today and Microsoft unveiled a few really cool things and a few not so much things. Obviously I work for Adobe so all the standard disclaimers apply.

First things first, lots of new bits. They dropped versions of Silverlight 2 Beta, Internet Explorer 8, Expression Studio 2 Beta and hooks for Silverlight and Visual Studio. Silverlight penetration is coming along at a rate of 1.5 million downloads a day and growing. That should get them to their number of 200 million downloads by June of this year. Flash has about 12 million downloads a day for comparison but I think that’s a very good number for Microsoft. No big news but some fun stuff to play with. Now on to the announcements.

A lot of the demos were things that we’d seen or heard of before like the Olympics site in Silverlight but there were a few gems that I think flew under the radar of some people. One is the adaptive streaming bit with Silverlight. In my opinion that was one of the coolest features of the day. I know that the Ooyala team has something like it in their video player. Adaptive streaming lets you provide the best experience to the user based on their system. If the bandwidth is slow and/or the machine isn’t up to speed, the stream automatically adjusts the experience so the user gets the highest watchable quality possible. This was one of the things that has made Move Networks so successful. That was the biggest surprise for me - the announcement of a partnership with Move and Microsoft around Silverlight. I don’t have any details of what the partnership looks like but that could be a big deal.

The coolest demo of the day was a deep zooming feature that was used on the Hard Rock Site. Microsoft has features in their tools that will let you stitch together a bunch of images and then a component that displays them so you can use the mouse wheel to get insane levels of detail on the stitched-together image. Pretty neat stuff. The rest of the demos were kind of blah. The AOL Mail application was good looking after they switched the skin to the Halo version but they showed things like “sorting a grid control” which is doable in Ajax. Even as a big Flash guy I wasn’t sure that using Silverlight on that application was a great showcase of the technology. They did do a fun/cool demo of WPF and Cirque Du Soleil

The other big news was the fact that Silverlight mobile will be released on Nokia devices. The showed a couple of demos (one good, one bad) of Silverlight applications running on a S60 device. It sounds really cool and the way I understood it you could take the same Silverlight code and run it on the phone or browser. Two big questions were when will it be available and what is the licensing model. It seems like Microsoft is trying to get Silverlight mobile deployed in a number of places so I would imagine they’ll make licensing as easy as possible.

Overall the keynote was good but not spectacular. Ray Ozzie talked a lot about “meshes” and how the ecosystem fits together. There were some very cool technical things with Silverlight but not a lot of examples to differentiate it with Flash. I was also hoping to see more about the workflow. At this point you can pretty much do anything you want to with Flash or Silverlight so what matters most in my mind is the tools. Blend got a few mentions but they were small bits and I would have liked to know more about their designer/developer story. They did show a “dev-igner” slide so that was cool. Maybe I need to go to the sessions to learn more.

Overall, even as an Adobe employee, I was hoping to see them push the boundaries and provide a ‘check’ to Adobe in the chess game. There was some of it, like the Silverlight mobile bit and adaptive streaming, but I was hoping for more tool innovation and more info about Silverlight 2 that we hadn’t heard about. But the crowd was energetic and it’s clear there’s a ton of RIA interest in the .NET world so we should see some great apps down the road.

February 29th, 2008

Interviews galore from Adobe's Engage event

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:58 am

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Adobe Engage, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Online Video, Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Andy Plesser was a busy guy at our Adobe Engage event this week. He talked to a lot of customers and attendees about what’s coming up and has been posting them over on his blog. I chatted with him about AIR and how it could fit into the entire video space from desktop to devices. For live coverage, Scoble provided the best angle, but Andy did a great job on getting a wide-range of subjects to talk about AIR, technology, and the web. I also know he’s going to have some more information that’s VERY relevant to anyone thinking about online video delivery.

• Nick Bilton from ShifD/New York Times
• Claude Courbois - NASDAQ Market Replay
• Robert Blatt - AOL’s XDrive
• Robert Scoble - FastCompany.tv