Silverlight Streaming in 5 minutes or less

Microsoft as part of the whole Silverlight ‘thing’ has provided a service to allow people to upload videos and get those video streamed along with providing other video streaming services. At the time of me writing this book it is a free service up to 4 gigs of space/video and streams video up to 700kpbs but as it goes into beta and is released you get advertising or you pay a ‘nominal’ fee but for developer’s and designers this is really cool and for companies this makes live a bit easier if you want to stream video content from you web site but don’t have a streaming media service.

A couple of key points of the streaming media service is to enable rapid application development, to be able to deliver quickly streaming media solutions and to be able to provide unlimited scaling should the need arise of your streaming content. The provide admin tools, a REST API, documentation and other tools online for your application development. Currently there are issues with Silverlight all living in the same domain so your bits out on Silverlight streaming need to be ‘all’ your bits but you can embed them in an iframe or separate window and pass in query string values etc. You can check out the service at :

http://silverlight.live.com/ or

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/streaming.aspx#1_4

So let us set up an account, starting from Silverligth.live.com.

Next we click on ‘get it free’. At some point a paid service will be available. But for now it is not.

Click the ‘click here’ link to go onto creating our streaming account.

If you don’t have a live id you will have to go through the registration process if you do then you can just login to create your account. In this case I do have such an id and I login and created my Streaming account and then the screen should look like this after logging in.
So when you click ‘I Accept, Create Account’ you then have your account.

This screen show your public account id and account key. You will want to know these later when we upload some content using the Microsoft Media Encoder. You can learn more about Silverlight Streaming at:

http://dev.live.com/silverlight/

So From here we are ready to for my next post on media encoder.