IBC 2008 Report: Microsoft Demos Silverlight Enhancements Delivered by Move Networks Partnership
Connected TV | September 29, 2008
Microsoft Communications was showcasing its cross-browser video platform, Silverlight, at IBC to demonstrate some of the benefits of its deepening strategic partnership with Move Networks, a supplier of high-definition video-delivery technology.
Move is, in a sense, a rival to Brightcove and has a competing adaptive streaming technology which underpinned its collaboration with the Silverlight platform this summer for US network NBC’s online Olympics coverage.
This allows on-the-fly switching between 15 different possible video-bit rates, by pre-caching two-second chunks of video across different parts of the network. Move’s heuristics decide at two-second intervals what the network conditions are and accordingly what data-rate the player should be running the video at. As in Brightcove’s case, the aim is to prevent skipping or discontinuities in the video, by allowing ‘graceful degradation’ to take place between one level of picture quality and the next one up or down.