Silverlight’s Smooth Streaming
Silverlight announced two major features called Smooth Streaming and Deep Zoom with Silverlight 3 during the MIX09 conference. These features were demoed during the 2009 NAB Show that took place a couple of weeks ago.
Smooth Streaming is a HTTP-based adaptive media streaming technology that gives the user a glitch-free experience through seamless transition across various video qualities. Not surprisingly, the feature is currently tied down to Microsoft’s IIS Media Services. The IIS Web Server can have up to 7 different quality levels of a video and the Silverlight client requests the highest quality video based on the viewer’s local bandwidth and CPU usage at that moment in time.
You can see for yourself this feature at the Smooth Streaming Demo site. On that website, it is also possible to simulate end user experiences under varying conditions by simulating drops and recoveries in bandwidth. I am very much impressed by Smooth Streaming.
The other feature called Deep Zoom allows users to navigate, zoom in and out of photo albums with greater fluidity than, say, a slideshow. This is being demoed at DeepZoomPix but you need a Windows Live ID to check it out. You can see a small demo even here.
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Hi Sravan,
there’s a good real world use of deepzoom over here. http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/
Ariel
Thanks for the example, Ariel. I found an even better one.
http://playboy.covertocover.com/ (NSFW)