Microsoft has turned to Akamai Technologies in its continuing war to once again dominate web video, and take on market leaders Adobe with Microsoft Silverlight. Microsoft will drop the Move Networks technology into the next version of its IIS web servers, and use the new Adaptive Edge service of Akamai to offer streaming video that starts in an instant, all the way up to HD quality.
Akamai will release a beta version of the new service, sitting on Windows Server 2008 and supporting Silverlight.
We’re betting that this ‘Adaptive Edge’ network that Akamai is talking about is what it told us about a year ago at IBC. Back then it was calling it Large File Download Optimization technology, which ships pieces of files around its own internal network, rather like BitTorrent, taking the most popular parts of HD video files to the network edge.
If you partner this with the fact that Microsoft has made an investment in Move Networks and is now also a partner of Move, and that its system ships out video in two second chunks so that it can vary the resolution based on network conditions, working with the cache of content delivery networks, it all makes for a genuine HD video set up. The result of the Move system alone is that video already plays virtually instantaneously, initially in low quality but improves after 2 to 4 seconds and resolves to something approaching 720p HD quality on a PC screen. Add that to the Akamai service and bundle the capability into an IIS serer upgrade, and Silverlight video could get a huge lift.
Akamai has around 25,000 servers, in 1000 different locations across 70 countries, it reckons that its servers are ‘local’ to any customer that wants to download a genuine HD video files. By Local it means a few hundred miles away, rather than the few 1,000 miles away where most of its rival sit. The challenges of packet loss and network latency make it impossible to deliver HD files effectively over that distance, except that this is just what the Move system was designed for.
Akamai has been supporting Silverlight for about a year for delivering interactive video but we assume that its new service will be up for partnering with Adobe as well, because as a content delivery network it can hardly play favorites between the two leading video formats, especially as Microsoft has been adding features such as H.264 encoding to make Silverlight more and more like Flash video all the time. Microsoft will also tell you that it uses standard software end to end, using distributed HTTP-based Web servers, unlike Adobe.
Smooth Streaming is the name for the version which we assume uses the Move Networks software. ‘Smooth Streaming is an evolution of proven Silverlight technology that has powered global online events,’ said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft. ‘Our objective has always been to provide a platform that enables next-generation media experiences on the Web. Together with Akamai, we will take that a step further by offering a consistently superior adaptive streaming experience on a global scale.’
The service will be available to select Akamai customers in a beta release in early 2009.