Netshow: Microsoft's Streaming Video Product

Netshow is the multimedia technology built into the Microsoft Internet Information Server and Microsoft's entry into the streaming audio/video competition.

As usual the company is late to the party but is rapidly taking market share away from start ups that pioneered the technology like VDO, Progressive Networks--makers of RealAudio and RealVideo--and XingStreamworks.

Microsoft has just released the version 2.0 beta and is promoting the technology by putting a lot of its own content online like the recent CEO Summit which is being made available through the AudioNet Web distribution service.

Other recent uses include the United Nations daily press briefings and events such as the UN Earth Summit+5 conference which are distributed via The Internet Broadcast Center. On the business side, pharmaceutical giant Warner-Lambert uses Netshow to present their fiscal year 1996 results to the world.

Microsoft has also made partnerships with other important players in the Web video arena, notably Progressive Networks, Vxtreme and Vivo Software. They have also participated in the IP Multicast Initiative Summit.

In particular, Microsoft will license Progressive's RealAudio and RealVideo, while Progressive plans aggressive support of fundamental Microsoft technologies. As part of the agreement, Microsoft has also made a minority investment in Progressive Networks.

Vxtreme's advanced compression technology and authoring tools will support NetShow and the NetShow player will now include the Vivo decoder technology. The VivoActive Producer 2.0 is being touted as the first production tool for creating streaming audio/video content for the Microsoft NetShow platform.

In all these alliances, the first objective is to obtain interoperability between the rival servers and clients. As part of this, Microsoft will work cooperatively and with other industry partners to define future versions of Microsoft's Active Streaming Format (ASF). Microsoft's goal is to make ASF the native streaming format for the next version of its partners streaming media product developments.

Microsoft says that a number of major themes drive the feature set of NetShow 2.0. NetShow 1.0 delivered basic audio and video services, enabled multicast and unicast delivery of live and on-demand content, and provided the essential interfaces for codec vendors, tools vendors, and Web masters to build value-add software. The key themes driving the functionality of NetShow 2.0 focus on extending the strengths of NetShow 1.0 to provide an open, standards-based system that customers can use for production deployments of audio and video broadcasts.

New features, which will be incrementally added to NetShow 2.0 over the course of subsequent beta releases, include the delivery of live, real-time encoded audio, video, and illustrated audio content. It will also offer on-demand content over any network, independent of the transmission techniques and network transports used. This means that people using NetShow can broadcast live and on-demand content using either unicast or multicast techniques, depending on their needs and the available network infrastructure.

This is quite a significant advantage. Unicast means that each viewer is sent a whole copy of the data directly from the server, consuming a great deal of bandwidth in the process. Multicast means that networks with multicast routers in the path of a group of viewers can "fan out" the streams so that one stream from the server can be seen by many viewers without placing any additional burden on the server.

Netshow is a natural companion to NetMeeting, Microsoft's video conferencing product--a rival to the popular CU-SeeMe from White Pine Software.

Though it was late to enter the streaming media and videoconferencing markets, Microsoft is doing its typically aggressive and capable job of covering all the product bases. The company is leveraging its operating system market share and its ability to partner with Intel, Cisco, and anyone else it needs to embrace and extend a popular product or product area.

But then, what else should we have expected.