SharePoint 2010 Video Planning Resources

I’ve done several SharePoint 2010 demos and presentations and it seems that almost every time I demo the new media web part that uses Silverlight to display video, I always get a lot of questions. How does it work? How much bandwidth? Can you throttle? There is a lot of interest (an indicator to me that more and more large organizations expect to use video on the web) but also a lot of concern on how to manage – especially as it relates to the network bandwidth.

I’ve done some research and there are really multiple considerations here.

The best single link is a fairly new Technet article on caching and performance planning with SharePoint 2010:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424404(office.14).aspx
Summary: performance can be tuned through disk-based BLOB caching and bit rate throttling

Bitrate throttling configuration walkthrough
https://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/148/bit-rate-throttling-configuration-walkthrough/
Summary: detailed guide from the IIS team

More direction on where we’re going with streaming (the out-of the-box media web part uses buffering, NOT streaming. Streaming is enabled via IIS media services)
https://misfitgeek.com/blog/iis-media-services-3-0/
Summary: good overview of IIS Media Services 3.0

And finally, Silverlight 4 capabilities, including multicasting. Currently SL4 is in beta:
https://scorbs.com/2009/11/19/pdc-session-silverlight-4-beta-overview/
https://blogs.msdn.com/ncl/archive/2009/11/18/udp-multicast-in-silverlight-4.aspx

I realize this is a lot of links but I wanted to provide a complete picture, since there is a lot coming down the pipe. Between SharePoint 2010, IIS Media Services, and Silverlight 4 we’ll have a very powerful toolkit for almost any web-based video display scenario!

Good luck!