Video Breakthroughs

At Streaming Media West 2010 last November, Microsoft launched IIS Media Services 4.0. This HTTP-based media server stack plugs into Internet Information Services (IIS), the web server built into Windows. Unlike traditional streaming servers, IIS Media Services scales out using any HTTP caching server, rather than requiring specific downstream streaming media servers. Today, Microsoft announced it is releasing the beta of a new IIS extension we previously discussed called IIS Transform Manager.

IIS Media Services extensions effectively turn IIS into a media origin server, but because IIS Smooth Streaming can use either IIS caching servers or any other standard HTTP caching servers downstream to scale (rather than requiring specific downstream streaming servers, as traditional streaming servers such as FMS or WMS typically do), the scale-out is not at all locked to any one server solution.

Microsoft sees Transform Manager as an integral part of an Expression Encoder 4 Pro encoding workflow in three areas: converting existing content libraries to other formats, such as Smooth Streaming; constant ingest/ transcode; and converting fragmented MP4 files to Apple HTTP Live Streaming segments for on-demand content delivery.