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M'soft Media Move Microsoft looks to standardize streaming media By Junko Yoshida, EE Times Redmond, Wash. -- Moving on two fronts to promote streaming media, Microsoft Corp. will lead an effort to standardize the technology--and it has acquired a developer of adaptive compression. With its deal for VXtreme Inc., Microsoft has obtained streaming-media technologies that can scale from POTS to broadband cables. In taking on today's chaotic streaming-media market on the Internet, Microsoft will partner with more than 30 tool, service and content vendors in an ambitious attempt to build the industry's de facto file format and platform for streaming media. Such partners, including VDOnet Corp., Vivo Software Inc. and Progressive Networks Inc., have agreed to support Microsoft's new file format for streaming media, called Active Streaming Format (ASF), and to build their new products for NetShow, Microsoft's client-server platform for multiple media-data types. The partners will also collaborate with Microsoft to define future versions of ASF specifications to make the file format more flexible and adaptable to the rest of the industry. The move by the software giant is critical to the future growth of a streaming-media market. "Today, this market consists of a hodgepodge of technologies," said Michael Ahern, Microsoft product manager of SiteServer and NetShow. "Independent software-vendor and tool companies are all using more than a dozen different file formats and clients. "We will have these industry partners get together within the next 60 days, and start discussions to define future enhancements on ASF," Ahern said. The acquisition of VXtreme (Sunnyvale, Calif.), already completed for an undisclosed sum, will complement Microsoft's recently announced plan to license technology from Progressive Networks, Ahern said. By acquiring VXtreme's entire development team, the Redmond giant hopes to quickly build an in-house effort to integrate VXtreme's adaptive-compression technology into Microsoft's NetShow and SiteServer. VXtreme's technology is fundamentally very different from that of Progressive Networks. "Our technology is unique," said Tony Barbagallo, vice president of marketing at VXtreme, "as it allows a single authored content to dynamically scale its video quality in accordance with available bandwidth between a server and clients at a given time." Meanwhile, by licensing Progressive Networks' RealAudio and RealVideo 4.0 technologies, Microsoft will also integrate them into its NetShow streaming server. The objective is to ensure interoperability between clients and servers from Microsoft and Progressive Networks. VDOnet will also jump on the bandwagon to support ASF and NetShow. The company, a developer of bandwidth-scalable compression, participates in the efforts not as a codec provider but as a partner to help Microsoft integrate various components of the NetShow and offer video solutions--on the NetShow platform--for broadband networks. (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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