Brandon.ToString()

About a month ago, I made a decision to pull Live Smooth Streaming support from our Nimbus product offering. It is our most requested feature by far. Nearly every account signup wants to live stream, and who wouldn’t?

I’m not crazy. Problem is, Live Smooth Streaming is the Cinderella of content delivery, and she’s stuck at home.

A little background – This “smooth streaming” concept kicked off somewhere around 2009 (MSFT’s first Smooth Streaming event I believe was the French Open). To get in the game, you had to have some crazy hardware, most likely a couple dedicated encoders running $20K a piece. Add to that 10mbps of upstream bandwidth to support it, and you’ve got a behemoth (yep, I said behemoth) of flying bits to deal with. Cinderella rides in a really, really expensive carriage.

Then, in 2010, Microsoft released Expression Encoder 4. The gates of heaven opened, and no longer did you have to have a $20K encoder – you could now do it with a piece of software that costs in between “free” to $200. This is where we came in. We provided the publishing points, origin services, and CDN – everything you needed to deliver your live event to the world.

Folks started using it, and streaming events from corporate webinars in the USA to operas in Russia. While it was okay for the most part, we found in a consistent stream of support issues:

• While most folks had hardware good enough for single-bitrate streams (good enough for Flash, Windows Media, UStream), it was by and large insufficient for Smooth Streaming. Trying to overtax the hardware produced weird results with audio/video sync and reliability issues.
• Connection recovery wasn’t pretty.

After a number of months with these issues, I pulled it. That begs the question, what now? I think the answer lies in encoding.

There is no question that adaptive streaming is the future. There is and will continue to be a big difference between the bandwidth you have at work, at home, on your mobile device, and soon, in your car. There’s a big difference between the size of your iPhone screen and your 60” living room smart TV. Media must adapt to your device and network before we can move toward phasing out television and toward interactive experiences on a wide scale.

This is what makes Smooth Streaming the Cinderella of live video on the web; the most beautiful solution, sitting at home mopping the floors while stepsister Flash is off to the ball. I’m not knocking services like UStream and Livestream.com – they’re good services; but just using older technology.

Smooth Streaming will remain an option reserved only for those with huge budgets for as long as 100% of the encoding burden is on the client. The bar is too high for this technology.

At MIX ‘11 in Vegas, the Channel 9 team did an incredible job of producing and streaming the event. They rented fiber at $500/hr and a bank of encoders. These are not normal people. This is a huge corporation with a high-profile event. It looks great, but the bar is 5 miles high in the sky.

Non-mainstream sports. Concerts. User groups. Weddings. Church. Webinars. Corporate training. Just a few examples of live events that have huge potential for higher-quality engagement that will keep deferring to other technologies until the bar is lowered. In other words, normal people are going to be happy with Cinderella’s stepsisters until the carriage is affordable.

So that’s what we’re going to do next. We’re moving encoding “to the cloud”. In a couple weeks we’ll push out the first beta. With the burden of encoding moved to the datacenter, we can push as much quality as your connection can handle, with a high quality stream on normal hardware. This is the first step in making a superior adaptive-streaming technology accessible to the events that can benefit from it.

Come on Cinderella, hop in.