With the Smooth Streaming technology you will be able to give your audience the finest possible viewing experience . While utilizing Smooth Streaming your videos will be shown at the best suited bit-rate because it can assess the available bandwidth. This way you will by no means have to fret about your viewers having a horrible experience with your video streams.

The strength of Smooth Streaming lies in the fact that you can seamlessly change the video quality of a media file that a player receives in near real time. Consumers that already have high internet connections will be able to experience high definition streaming quality while people with reduced bandwidth speeds will be able to receive the best services that their internet connections can handle, this way allowing everyone to enjoy a very good and continuous streaming experience and for this reason rescuing the media firms from being forced to settle for the smallest common denominator quality level from their customer base.

This enables businesses to boost brand awareness and advertising revenues by improving standard viewing instances through higher quality true High-definition (resolution greater than 720p) experiences. Smooth Streaming makes it possible for organizations to have even additional clients and to supply them even better viewing quality. They also benefit from better network scalability using HTTP based web servers.

Smooth Streaming is rather easy to perform. Installing Silverlight on your Apple computer or PC is all that you are required to do as an customer. As a content creator you will also be expected to upgrade your encoding software as Smooth Streaming requires a certain encoding software program.

So that you can stream media assets to clients, hosting providers will need to have IIS Media Services installed on their servers. Installing IIS Media Services is only a necessity on the origin servers. In an effort to correctly pass through Smooth Streaming URLs hosting providers will also require to manage the edge cache/proxy infrastructure.

For application developers to effectively use Smooth Streaming they will have to add Smooth Streaming playback support to their Silverlight applications. This is easily attainable with the help of the Silverlight player templates that are included in the Expression Encoder. Additionally you could also use Silverlight Media Framework with Smooth Streaming Client.

If you are looking to create Smooth Streaming presentations you will need to encode the videos in a specific method. The source would have to be encoded at diverse bit-rates with each bit-rate being one complete file. This way the server produces virtual fragments and will be able to switch between which complete file is delivering. For Smooth Streaming presentations you will need to use the Microsoft Expression Encoder.