Silverlight Code That Powers Live Streaming Sports Released

Must I remind you – it’s Silverlight on a mother-effen phone! And look at what MS just did. They released the code on Codeplex that allows for real time streaming and which has been used in sports events with spectacular results in the past:

The SMF is built on a proven code base with dozens of leading Smooth Streaming deployments, including Wimbledon, Sunday Night Football on NBCSports, the UEFA Super Cup on Canal+, Roland Garros and the Tour de France on France Télévisions and many others and by providing developers with source code they can more easily build these experiences for their deployments. Key features in the framework include DVR, rewind, alternate language tracks, in-stream data feeds and analytics tracking. The SMF is designed for future third-party extensibility and component modularity, as well as support for other media delivery scenarios beyond Smooth Streaming.

So the more of this that we see, the more we can expect WP7 to have some spectacular sports and event apps that are interactive and powerful. And, as it turns out, profitable. In a case study discussing NBC’s Olympic Games site (which was Silverlight based on the same streaming code) one of the features that was used was the ability to watch the audience levels in real time to determine the level of ads that could be deployed to be profitable without alienating your audience. And this was streaming in 720p in real time but you could use your PC as a DVR and within minutes you had access to content that had just occurred. A plug for Vertigo is called for here since they were heavily involved in NBC’s video and photo viewer. They’re also involved in some of the apps for WP7 that we’ve already seen like the Netflix and Shazam apps. This is all headed in a great direction.