Free Product Giveaway: Microsoft Expression Studio

Thanks to the generous folks over at Microsoft, they have provided me with nine copies of Expression Studio that I can give away on the blog. The Expression Studio bundle includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Media and Expression Design and retails for $599. Expression Studio also includes a license for Expression Encoder and anyone can currently download a 180 day trail of the encoder here.

Three have already been given away in a drawing last month and I'll be giving the last six away in the next two weeks. I would like to give them away to those who will really use them as part of their daily job. To qualify to win a copy you must leave one comment in this post with a suggestion for Microsoft on how they can improve any aspect of Expression, Silverlight or Windows Media. Have you seen a feature you'd like included? Is there something missing that you think should be in the next version? Leave a comment with a working e-mail address. I will pick three users a week from today using a random number picker website and ship them out to the winners at no cost. Anyone is welcome to enter, but only your first comment will be counted.

If any company is interested in getting exposure for their video related product on my blog and is willing to give away the product, contact me. I will post pictures of the product, link to the company website and potentially write a product review or link to other reviews on the web. It's great exposure for your product.

Comments

[guy]

It'd be nice to see some format convergence and have silverlight support mpeg-4 h.264 the same way flash is heading.

[Alex Bridges]

It would be useful to have a clear road map on when certain functionality will be made available to developers in relation to Silverlight.

It would be useful to know what the projected adoption rates are going to be in relation to users accepting the Silverlight plugin.

It would be useful to know if Silverlight will be automatically installed for instance as part of an new version / IE update.

[Melvyn]

I tried last month and I'll try again here. One aspect (non-technical) of Silverlight that could be improved is the marketing. Popus on every Windows Live site do not count as marketing. There are many techies out there with very little idea of what Silverlight is and how they could benefit from it. MS - push your product more intelligently!

[Antoine Drochon]

My wish:

Please, integrate a simple way to make failover as we used to with WSX on server side and WMP on client side.

It would be a great feature for big Digital Media companies running massive live streaming event.

Antoine

[Bruce N. Goren]

Silverlight will need to offer free downloadble publishing plug-ins to more than just Expression if they hope to gain any sort of traction in this brave new Flash, VP6, H.264 world. I use the Adobe CS3 universe of applications, if Dan gifts me a copy of Expression Studio I'll cetainly try it out on my projects, but otherwise there is not much chance I would bother .

[Tom Streeter]

I'm going to echo an earlier comment and say that having a surer sense of the roadmap would be very useful: I see they've started talking about version 2 and I'm not sure when 1.1 is really going to hit. I can encode Windows Media on my Mac via Flip4Mac's stuff, and I'm OK with running a virtual machine (I happen to use Parallels, but VMWare is great, too), but it would be nice to be able to do some at-least lightweight content development on the Mac side without having to edit XAML by hand. I saw that it's supposed to be coming in v2, but it scares me to have 2 talked up before 1.1 -- which feels like it will be the "finished" version -- is out the door.

[Toshi Aizawa]

I prefer having ActiveX control option with Silverlight, as some people hate installing .exe in my market. ActiveX is IE-specific and doesn't go well with cross-browser nature of the product, but the option can accelerate the adoption, I believe.

I also second to Antoine, rollover with playlist is a very popular technique to make live events more reliable. That needs to be supported.

toshi

[Jonathan Healy]

Microsoft should download Silverlight and subsequent updates via Windows Update for those using Windows. That would vastly increase the percentage of users with Silverlight, and would put the format on more even footing with Flash.