Silverlight is Microsoft's technology for creating rich Internet applications in competition with Adobe's Flash and related products. The idea is to provide a programming environment that is familiar to Windows developers along with browser plug-ins for Windows, Mac OS X and mobile devices. An open-source implementation called Moonlight is being developed by the Mono team.
The advantage of H.264 is that it provides good quality at relatively low bit rates across a range of image resolutions. It is used by both Blu-ray and the ill-fated HD DVD standards, as a part of DVB-T (terrestrial digital TV) in various countries, in some IPTV systems, and for videoconferencing.
Apple has been selling H.264 videos through the iTunes Store since 2005, and YouTube progressively moved its content to H.264, largely to suit Apple TV, iPhone and iPod touch users.
Adobe added support for H.264 playback to Flash Player in August 2007, having already enhanced its media creation tools with H.264 encoding.
And now Microsoft is set to join the club. The company used the IBC2008 conference to preview support for H.264 video and AAC audio playback in an unspecified future release of Silverlight.
Microsoft will also support H.264 encoding in its Expression content creation tools and its delivery from Windows Server 2008.
What does this mean for broadcasters and content creators? Find out on
page two - along with other Microsoft news from IBC2008.
For broadcasters and other content creators, this means there will be less need to transcode video for different purposes.
"Using Silverlight, we are very excited to be able to offer the same advanced features and high-quality video to customers both on Windows and Mac browsers," said Pierre Brossard, CEO of French broadcaster TF1.
"In addition, through Microsoft's announced support for MP4 standard formats in Silverlight, we’ll be able to easily repurpose existing libraries of H.264 and AAC content and extend the future reach of our service to an ever-growing market of MP4-capable devices." (H.264 is part of the MPEG-4 standard.)
Microsoft also used IBC2008 to announce the co-development of a system for the management and distribution of digital terrestrial TV content over the Internet, an advertising system for the Mediaroom IPTV platform, and Protected Broadcast Driver Architecture (PBDA).
PBDA - which supersedes BDA (Broadcast Driver Architecture) - makes it possible for the manufacturers of TV tuners to accommodate broadcast content protection schemes in their products for Windows Media Center.
"For the first time, we're enabling those in the PC-TV community to build tuners and integrate almost any broadcast service into Windows Media Center themselves regardless of geographic location or television standard — we've removed a major roadblock by delivering one consistent platform for the industry," said Geoff Robertson, general manager for Windows Media Center at Microsoft.
"The tremendous response we're already seeing for the platform means PC OEMs, broadcast service providers and tuner-makers can now collaborate and embrace the PC as a first-class citizen for delivering more high-quality free or pay content to consumers in their local markets," he added.
It's funny the way vendors can make technology sound like a good thing even when it's designed to make it harder for us to watch TV the way we want to. The music industry is finally realising that DRM isn't the way to go, so it's a shame the TV and movie makers don't seem to be able to learn from that experience.
