You’d think RTMP was a swearword the way Microsoft Silverlight adherents curse it as a proprietary protocol, and that’s the main positioning that remains different now after Microsoft’s sudden capitulation in Silverlight both to a native H.264 codec and to further plug in codecs, to up the ante in streamed video over the web. Naturally it’s latest round of thinking came out at the IBC show and exhibition in Amsterdam this week, where it also showed Move Networks off its stand for the first time.
Actually Microsoft doesn’t really have a stand at the show, but grabs the entire Topaz Suite upstairs between the conference centre and hall 7, and makes room for all of its partners and various divisions.
Never since the launch of Windows 2.1 (which we remember) have we seen Microsoft so ardent on one topic, that of pushing Silverlight as both a superior application for delivering video and other rich media, over Adobe’s Flash Video.
Microsoft brushes over the fact that Silverlight is not implemented on any platform other than its own, so not yet on Linux or on Symbian, instead focusing on the proprietary nature of Adobe, implying it to be a bad thing even though it runs on open operating systems.
The truth is that in the worlds eyes Adobe can be trusted to have a proprietary system without developing it into a monopoly. But that’s only true for so long as Adobe is the underdog. As soon as it kills off Windows Media or Silverlight or both, it would just be too powerful, so it makes sense for the world to play the two applications off against one another.
But as for saying that the RTMP server is proprietary that’s a bit like saying the wheel was proprietary when it was invented. What RTMP does is it makes all the timing stuff in video easy ‘ doing the work of real time scheduling that previously required a programmer to set up a Real Time Streaming Protocol server, using Real Time Transport Protocol. The RTMP just does the same job but makes it idiot proof to put Flash video on a web site. It simplifies the tools. That’s the same thing that Silverlight does really, except that Microsoft says is putting all that timing stuff into Silverlight and its IIS web server. So while Microsoft is making a big deal out of saying that it is the one that’s not proprietary here, it is playing catch up, something that we’ve documented at length in our ‘Empire Strikes Back’ piece we wrote on Silverlight entitled ‘Video Wars: Microsoft’s journey from monopoly to ecology in web video’ from the NAB show in April.
But when Gabriele Di Piazza, Managing Director, Media & Entertainment, Communications Sector at Microsoft, says, ‘This is no longer a format war, this is about a rich media applications environment,’ he backed up those claims by announcing at the show native support for H.264 in Silverlight, alongside its existing VC1 codec, and by opening the architecture for any other codec, which can be developed as a plug in. He is doing what every supplier up against a proprietary environment does, he is taking the open road.
We had already talked at the show to On2 Technologies who’s main claim to fame is that it had supplied its VP6 codec to Adobe, at a time when codec licensing was a big concern, as a cheap, but effective codec to initiate the dominance of Adobe Flash Video as a format. On2 had launched its VP8 outputting better quality video, in lower bandwidth, with a faster encode rate ‘ alongside claims of a 20% to 30% improvement ‘ and the first thing they said was now that Silverlight was open, they would plug their shiny new codec into it. So potentially the shift to H.264 as a native option for both Flash and Silverlight may do On2 no harm.
On2 managed to get Skype to bundle VP7 for video conferencing, and has optimized VP8 for the Arm core which sits on virtually every mobile phone on the planet, so it now has a following of its own and may not need another fillip like the continued support of Adobe, in order to flourish. But it is likely that Adobe will want an edge on its Flash Lite platform and that may come in the form of adopting VP8 at some stage, for the handset.
But the real reason for On2’s rise to power was its clear ownership of intellectual property that it had a right to license for inclusion in a player that was to be given away for free. No-one has ever revealed what Microsoft had to pay to license its own VC1, but when it attempted to set up a patent pool for it, there were found to be 11 other companies claiming that their intellectual was essential to make VC1 work.
Microsoft makes great play out of the fact that one of the chairs of the H.264 committee was from Microsoft, but that can only raise more bile in the mouths of those who believe that VC1 is little more than a collection of all the ideas that Microsoft came across during that chairing process, although when we last looked Microsoft held about 165 patents in codecs, many of which are to be found in the H.264 standard.
But when Adobe first thought of creating Flash video, it thought that On2 was the better bet. Now licensing on H.264 is clearer, it can afford to give away millions of copies and embraced H.264 earlier this year using an implementation from MainConcept, now a subsidiary of DiVX, and now Microsoft has done the same, writing the codec itself and supporting H.264 authoring using its Expression Encoder software tools. That means that VC1 and On2 codecs may just be there for legacy support and H.264 is now a common standard for web video.
In fact Microsoft Silverlight may shortly be able to view almost any video format, if enough plug ins are built for it, except of course for Flash Video ‘ even though the codec will be common, Microsoft is unlikely to be able to intercept FLV files.
Microsoft said that 56 million streams of Silverlight video were shown to 42 million users during the Olympics and that the recent Democratic Convention web site in the US has shown the Obama presidential acceptance and other speeches 107 million times, all using Silverlight.
If there is a split in perception between the two environments ‘ Silverlight and Adobe Flash ‘ it could be seen in the way the man in the street loves Flash and the major corporations love Silverlight ‘ and Microsoft announced customers to include European broadcasters TF1 in France, RTL in Germany, ITV and Setanta Sport in the UK and RAI in Italy to go with NBC for its Olympics coverage. All of these are attracted perhaps to the version of PlayReady which is being designed to protect and encrypt valuable streams of video, which should be out before the end of the year for working with Silverlight (although the final PlayReady will also work with files and progressive downloads as much as with streams). The other protection that Silverlight offers is similar to that of Adobe Flash, the ability to use server side playlists to dictate what is streamed so that advertising cannot be fast forwarded through. Adobe put its playlists on the PC, but obfuscates it so that it cannot be interfered with by users.
But the star of the show was probably Move Networks, which seems to have captured the imagination of the web TV community far more since it took investment from Microsoft, than it did before.
The Move system sends its video in 2 second chunks but Microsoft insists that what actually happens is that every variant of video format, and resolution that it offers up, is sent to a cache on the internet, and that it is the performance of the access network which decides which resolution of video can be streamed to end user. The result is video that plays instantaneously, in low quality and after 2 or 4 seconds resolves to something approaching 720p HD quality on a PC screen.
Our only problem after the show was that our virus checker seemed to think that the Move site was a Phishing site and wouldn’t let us get there, something that should be resolved shortly, but which meant that instead of the 30 seconds that it took to enable our PC for Flash video, it took some 20 minutes for Move and Silverlight to install.
Other companies at the show that pushed new products for web video were DRM company Widevine, Swedish server company Edgeware and the UK’s Inuk networks that has its own PC based virtual set top, extracted from its PC based IPTV service used by 160,000 UK students.
Widevine was keen to point out yet again that it is the only DRM system that works with IPTV, PC, Macs and already supports Microsoft’s Silverlight, ahead of the Microsoft’s release of PlayReady. Matt Canard VP of marketing told us, ‘Even Hulu is offering unprotected video right now, using Adobe Flash, and it’s a perfect opportunity for Widevine to help some of the bigger broadcasters and TV operators to bridge the gap to the open internet.’
Widevine uses AES encryption and something it calls Digital Copy Protection on a PC, which it says looks at all applications running concurrently on a PC and ensures that none of them such as ICEs or screen scrapers are able to take a copy of the content that it is playing. The Widevine Cypher system allows streamed copy protection as well as playing files delivered to a PC which are already assigned a license.
As unique as this approach was described by Widevine, funnily enough it is virtually the same basis that Inuk users for its Igloo virtual set top, and describes the application list that it won’t allow to run alongside video playout as a virus checker looking for a signature of those type of piracy applications. If any are running they are either switched off, or the user is told to switch them off, or the video won’t run. This is built into Igloo and works alongside set top emulation software and off its stand we saw a Mac Mini thinking that it was an Amino Aminet 110 and another that thought it was a Motorola set top. The company has also tied up with Move networks to use its adaptive streaming system, and has just cut a deal with Magnet in Ireland for Igloo.
Swedish company Edgeware made a big splash last year by adopting huge Flash Memory file stores for VoD serving, with 1,000s of streams supported by single racks of flash chips. This year it introduced the same idea to web video, with its new Reflex 2xx Web TV server with the first already sold at the show to Maxisat, a Finnish equipment supplier to this community.
Edgeware’s Reflex servers can deliver up to 32,768 concurrent video streams over the public Internet and can be co-hosted close to consumer premises in a distributed environment because they only occupy a 1U of rack space, consume 85 Watt of power and require minimal maintenance.
Sales VP Jim Wilkinson told us, ‘We have just had to adapt Reflex to stream over TCP/HTTP instead of over UDP which is used for IPTV networks. They kick into life by playing at double or triple speed so that a progressive download has a head start, but as soon as they have built up a sufficient buffer, they automatically back off to the required streaming speed. They are ideal as VoD servers for IPTV and cable operators who want to offer a service outside of their footprint.’
There will have been many other products addressing web delivered video at IBC and we covered some of the DRM conditional access adaptations last week, and the shift to the PC can now be considered definitively a trend and services will begin emerging in the coming months.