First Day of IBC

Updated Saturday September 11th 2010 at 11am CET.

IBC (International Broadcasting Conference) takes place every September in Amsterdam and is one of the most important events for broadcast and media professionals. We're live here in the Digital Marketing & Experiences zone in the Microsoft Topaz Lounge with our cousins from Windows Embedded and Mediaroom who are big users of Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming!

Today, we made several announcements, which you can read in our press release and follow along on www.microsoft.com/media. The key ones for those of you with an Expression, IIS Media Services or Silverlight interest are:

• Microsoft IIS Media Services 4.0 will be available next month.
• Expression Encoder 4 is available for direct volume licensing to OEMs, IHVs, and ISVs. Read more on Eric Ligman's Partner SMB community blog.
• Expression Encoder 4 Pro will feature high performance acceleration of H.264 output using NVIDIA GPUs with CUDA technology. You can read NVIDIA's press release on this here.

Read on to learn about the exciting demos in the Microsoft Topaz Lounge.

IIS Media Services 4.0

Chris Knowlton's blog will have full details of the IIS Media Services demos, but we have to call out a world first: live IIS Smooth Streaming with an end-to-end latency of under 2 seconds! The significance of this is for time-sensitive information like financial news. Our demo lets visitors see the sub 2 second latency for themselves by comparing the timecode on a broadcast feed with the timecode on the Smooth Streaming feed.

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3D 1080p Live Smooth Streaming

Together with partners Elemental Technologies, Level 3, NVIDIA and TVN Group, we're showing probably for the first time ever live and on-demand streaming of 1080p 3D content on the Internet using IIS Smooth Streaming through Level 3's content distribution network (CDN). The 3D feed comes from TVN Group, a German film and television production company, who have extensive 3D capabilities. Elemental's massively parallel encoders provide the live Smooth Streaming encoding, and NVIDIA's 3D Vision system provides the active shutter 3D experience.

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Silverlight Enhanced Movies

Silverlight Enhanced Movie brings all the features of DVD movies to streamed and downloaded content including multiple audio tracks, subtitles, trailers, bonus content, and interactive social networking and commerce features. Together with our partner Hypershow, we are showing various movies that have undergone the "enhanced" treatment.

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SRS Labs has also worked hard to build tools that help deliver SRS surround sound to Silverlight applications and compatible audio devices (receivers and sound cards). For more information, see their announcement.

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Set Top Boxes

We have two very different set top box (STB) demos this year. The first is from Netgem and features IIS Smooth Streaming but no Silverlight! To understand more about that, you'll have to read Chris' blog. The other is an Intel-based STB running Silverlight and is showing 1080p H.264 content with a beautiful Silverlight user interface.

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We also have our partners CSG Systems, Level 3, Ooyala and TwoFour Digital showing Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming solutions. More on these tomorrow...

Remember, if you're at IBC this year, be sure to stop by the Microsoft Topaz Lounge and enjoy an excellent cup of coffee[*] from our excellent coffee machine!

[* other beverages also available]

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