My First Experiment with Silverlight Streaming

I am in post production at the moment on a video I am hoping will be accepted as an Arcast episode. This is my first significant video editing experience, so I have had a lot of hurdles, and challenges to figure out. But this post isn’t about the horrible state of video editing software in the world right now (how anyone expects a normal consumer to do any of this is beyond me!).

I had a spare clip that was shot while we were doing a sound test. Jim Holmes and Philip Jordan just started gabbing. I thought this would be a good excuse to try out Silverlight streaming (while waiting 5.5 hours for the real video to render).

What is Silverlight Streaming? It is a new service off of live.com. You can go to http://silverlight.live.com to get all of the official details. Microsoft gives you up to 10GB of storage space, and up to 5TB of bandwidth! You simply login, and create an account.

Once you have an account, you can upload videos or music for online storage. You will be given a streaming ID (which is a public key), and a secret key for your own use, so you can secure your content.

You can then send links to those clips directly, or you can embed them in your web site, blog, etc. The Silverlight player will start streaming the video. Currently, no ads, bugs, or logos will be added onto your content. Later this year they will release an upgrade that allows you to generate ad revenue, just like AdCenter on your web site.

When you log into your account, you will see this menu.

If you click on the Manage Applications menu item, you will see where you can upload your own Silverlight application. This will let you have Microsoft host your application. The Silverlight Streaming system uses Microsoft’s global content network, so it’s reliable, fast, and always up.

Notice that it also shows you how much space you have available in your account.

I wanted to simply host a short video, so I clicked on Manage Videos. It list the videos I have uploaded, as well as some simple viewing statistics.

If I select a video, I will see a preview, some HTML code to embed it into a web site or blog, and a simple URL to send to people.

 

That’s it. It was really easy for me to do this. I didn’t have to ‘figure’ anything out. A lot easier than figuring out how to edit, and render video.