Microsoft & Akamai Announce "Smooth Streaming", New HD Video Delivery Via HTTP

This morning, Microsoft and Akamai announced a future new video delivery service dubbed "smooth streaming", designed to deliver HD video quality over the HTTP protocol. Using chunked encoding, the new technology will adapt the quality of the video stream in real time based upon the viewer's connectivity speed, also called "adaptive streaming". The service, which will run off of Microsoft's newly announced Web server technology called Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7.0), will utilize Silverlight for playback.

Currently in beta with a few Akamai customers, Akamai has also launched a new website at smoothhd.com to showcase the technology. The new Akamai service, dubbed "Akamai AdaptiveEdge Streaming for Microsoft Silverlight" will be available to select Akamai customers in a beta release in early 2009. While smooth streaming will be an upcoming feature of IIS7 Media Pack and technically available to other content delivery networks over time, Akamai is the first content delivery network to work with Microsoft to enable the functionality.

While it is too early to know what other CDNs will support the technology down the road, Microsoft made it clear that Akamai has worked with them to help develop the technology and enable the workflow to make this happen. When asked if this technology would be exclusive to Akamai, Microsoft would only comment to say, "Akamai is the first CDN to roll out this service". How long Akamai will be the only CDN in the market with this new service is unknown, especially since there is no word as to when in 2009 this will come out of beta. But Microsoft is a platform company so you can bet that over time, other CDNs will also adopt the service.

When launched, the new service will not have support for live streaming and won't work for videos that are downloaded to the desktop and played back at a later time. In addition, content owners who want to take advantage of the new service will have to re-encode their entire video library to utilize the new technology.

While the new service will enable content owners to deliver HD bits across Akamai's HTTP based servers, which is a lot more scalable than their streaming infrastructure, the real question that remains is how Akamai will charge for this new service. Delivering HD quality bits has always been more expensive and Akamai did acknowledge that the price was going to play a key factor in being able to sell the service. Since video will be delivered from Akamai's HTTP based infrastructure, the cost to deliver video should be much cheaper and more scalable than delivering video from their streaming media servers. As a result, Akamai should be able to pass that cost savings on to customers to encourage them to use the new service . But without knowing how they will charge for the offering, that remains to be seen. Akamai also stated that this new service is primarily directed towards major content owners and broadcasters with long form content and is not expected to appeal to the masses just yet.

In addition to the new service, Akamai is also working with Microsoft to make the HD workflow easier for content creators by enabling them to encode and ingest their video directly to Akamai from Microsoft's Expression Studio Encoder. This new functionality of the Expression Studio Encoder 2 SP1, will be ready early 2009 and will enable direct publishing to the Akamai network from within the encoder.

While the service sounds like it has the potential to provide better quality video, there is still no proof, that I have seen, that HD quality video allows for "greater engagement" and "improved monetization opportunities" like the press release states. While many in the industry want to say that HD quality video means viewers will watch content for longer periods of time, it also means that it costs more to deliver those bits. As viewers watch more content, at higher bitrates, the costs go up, not down. Until someone comes forward with a real example showing how a content owner delivered more ads in an HD stream, due to longer viewing times and as a result offset the additional cost required to deliver all the extra bits, it's all speculation. And if someone views a video for an extra 10 or 15 minutes longer, how exactly does that enable more monetization when most long-form videos don't even do in-stream ads? Most ads are still pre or post roll.

As an industry it sounds nice to say HD quality video means longer viewing times and more monetization, but the fact so few content owners are doing anything in HD, really says the opposite. If this new service from Akamai, using Microsoft's smooth streaming technology, can greatly reduce the cost to deliver HD quality video, then it has a shot. But until we know the pricing model for the new service, it's going to be hard to guess what impact it can have on the market anytime soon.

Comments

[Tim Street]

I sure wish these platform and standards wars would work themselves out so that the marketplace for advertising and sponsoring online video will be easy for media buyers.

[Rob]

Standards were driven in large part by hardware compatibility issues. These, while still important in broadcast situations, are largely not relevant in the Internet distribution scheme.

In other words, things change quickly and because they are generally implimented in software, the cost of change is low.

Btw, these "standards" drive billions in "licensing" revenue every year and are mostly just a tax.

[Christopher Levy]

Tim, why should the market slow down to accomodate the guaranteed to fail model of advertising and sponsorships? If anything this move just furthers to skim the scum on the milk and let the cream rise to the top. It's time we all took a deep and hard look at how we deploy our customer's content. The only way yur customer is going to be around in 2 years is if they are SELLING content.

[Christopher Levy]

BTW I just checked out the SmoothHD.com site and WOW THAT LOOKS AMAZING> Kit if you are out there: NICE WORK! :)

[Markell L]

Wow...has anyone started to consider PPV model for this type of content...I just watched this full screen on a 42 inch LCD TV and I had a hard time tryin' to tell myself this wasn't a broadcast signal from a cable company...WOW...forget about that H.264 codec...this stuff rocks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[tommes]

i saw this technology for flash before some days ago. A germany company called onlinelib has developed an flash based adaptive streaming protocol.

Here is the link for the demo applications:
http://onlinelib.de/vcsdemos/adapt

[Lisa Farris]

The intermitant stalling was not at all impressive.

[Christopher Levy]

Lisa,

Any "intermittent stalling" you might have seen is more than likely an issue related to your machine supporting the Silverlight player overhead. Is your machine a newer machine?

Regards,

Christopher

[Gordon L MacPherson, President, Atlantic Video Productions & Internet Services, Inc.]

You have to be kidding? If I presented this as an option to clients they would be insulted. This is VHS quality, OK maybe S-VHS, but not even close to HD.

Atlantic has been creating streaming media since its inception and currently use Sorenson Squeeze 5 Compression Suite to create good quality streams with Adobe FLV (Flash 8+) at the F8_512K setting with favorable results.

I have one client with a worldwide presence and they have received few if any complaints regarding buffering or latency and constantly hear from the field that image quality is the best they have ever experienced. Much of that is due to producing original video solely for the internet and addressing its pitfalls and also creating encoding schemes that bring content to the best level.

So many people on the engineering side understand video production. What they think is good or great is like looking at old Color TV from the early 60’s. It really is time to get up to speed and stop blowing your tired worn out horns and proclaiming you have the next great thing.

When you can equal cable, satellite or over the airways digital broadcasting give me a shout-out. Until then I would be flying very low under the radar until I could actually launch the next “Great Thing”. Just my thoughts.

I would really like to see someone breakthrough the HD ceiling for the web but based on what I saw today, that has yet to happen.

Good luck and good video...

[Christopher Levy]

Gordon,

Maybe you did not get the high-end stream to your machine?

Your site says you have been around for 10 years....... your not using that as a benchmark as to when the streaming media industry was created are you? :)

[Flv Player]

Very useful Article! Thanks a lot for given this...

[Open Box LCD TV]

Just watched smooth stream with my full HD 42". Furthermore not perfect picture experience but it's very nice dinner with my new girlfriend :)

[Kim Taylor]

There is a simple solution to the iPhone's ravenous appetite for 3G bandwith: investment in additional infrastructure, and pricing. ATT invested $18B this year to enhance 3G service, so that seems to be on track. But "unlimited" data usage is only workable when you have crappy devices that no one really wants to use very much. Nothing is REALLY unlimited in this world,

[LT]

Very helpful, Thanks for the great article.

[Blu Steven]

Not convinced that outright picture quality is the b all and end all in online video. Most popular videos are shot cheaply (sometime son mobile phones) and have that "This is not a set-up" feel to them. I think this helps retain the feeling that the internet is of the people for the people. If advertisers want to be part of this they need to play by the same rules. Get funky, get wild, and yes use good production standards where you can. But don't ever let your camera (or bandwidth) become bigger than your idea.