Our super busy NAB 2011 ended last week and we’ve mostly recovered! Our best laid plans of blogging from the show didn’t quite pan out since everyone was rushed off their feet the entire time. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising since at times it felt like all 92,708 were at the Microsoft booth!
We joined Microsoft Media & Entertainment’s presence at NAB, and featured our newly minted Microsoft Media Platform, which brings together our media products and frameworks under one umbrella. As usual we had some eye popping demos that were real crowd pleasers:
Enhanced Movies… in 3D!
In conjunction with our partners Hypershow, NVIDIA and SRS Labs, we showed a unique 3D audio and video experience powered by Silverlight Enhanced Movies. Featuring Paramount’s Jackass 3D movie, Silverlight Enhanced Movies brings rich interactivity, viewer engagement and of course 3D for downloaded and on-demand premium content. More on this exciting technology later, but for now here’s a teaser screenshot.
Multiscreen Continuous Client Imagine this: you’re interrupted while you’re watching your favorite show at home and you want to pick up from where you left off on another device – perhaps a PC at your friend’s house or your phone. Well now you can! Our Continuous Client demo showed how we leverage Windows Azure to synchronize player progress and enable the viewer to pick up from where they left off on virtually any Internet-connected device.
Multiscreen Continuous Client
Imagine this: you’re interrupted while you’re watching your favorite show at home and you want to pick up from where you left off on another device – perhaps a PC at your friend’s house or your phone. Well now you can! Our Continuous Client demo showed how we leverage Windows Azure to synchronize player progress and enable the viewer to pick up from where they left off on virtually any Internet-connected device.
Customer Demos Galore
While it is great to show technology demos, it is even better to show real live experiences across devices in our living room area. We had a couple of Xbox consoles showing BSkyB’s Xbox Live experience and the Canal+ experience. Both of these allow for live TV and on-demand streaming of content and because they’re on Xbox, they leverage some of the unique capabilities of that platform like shared viewing experiences. The BSkyB player even lets the viewer control it hands-free using a Kinect sensor! We also showed how other customers like Comcast’s Xfinity.tv service and Norway’s TV2 are leveraging the power of our Media Platform by using IIS Smooth Streaming and PlayReady to target a wide variety of devices including iPads and iPhones. Our partners thePlatform and Vimond respectively helped create these experiences.
By Keith Barnett, Media & Entertainment Marketing Manager