Silverlight Streaming: Free Video Hosting for All

Silverlight, as Microsoft's entry in the Rich Internet Application arena, is designed to permit developers using Microsoft technology and tools to quickly build and deploy web applications containing extensive graphics, animations and videos. Unless you are a large corporate developer with unlimited storage space and an OC3 Internet connection, hosting this type of content can be a challenge. Videos can consume huge amounts of storage space on a server and lots of bandwidth if they become popular, turning your graphically intense web site into a cost prohibitive venture. To help those lacking big iron and fat pipes, Microsoft has sent Silverlight Streaming to your rescue.

There are two distinct types of Silverlight content which can be hosted on Silverlight Streaming: Silverlight applications—principally XAML based Silverlight UserControls contained in .xap files—and audio and video files. Clearly the principal goal of Silverlight Streaming is to provide low cost, high bandwidth hosting for videos delivered to clients running Silverlight applications. But don't think Microsoft has completely moved into the web hosting business. Silverlight Streaming is not intended as a general purpose web hosting site due to the fact that the allowed file types do not include either .html or .aspx files.

Silverlight Streaming allows up to 10 GB of hosting space per account. Individual files cannot exceed 105 MB in size. This works out to a maximum video bit rate of 1.4 Mbps ((105 x 8) / (10 x 60)). There is a limitation of 5 TB of aggregated bandwidth per month per account. During the beta period for this service, hosting is free. After the service goes gold, hosting will remain free with advertising or will be available for a "competitive" fee without advertising.

A pilot program for Silverlight Streaming advertising was recently introduced and it turns out that not only is hosting with advertising free-of-charge, but participants can actually earn advertising revenues. As of this writing, Microsoft is still accepting more participants in this advertising pilot program, so if you are interested, you can apply here.

Creating a Silverlight Application for Deployment on the Silverlight Streaming Web Site
The MSDN® help files for Silverlight Streaming include a set of step by step instructions for creating a simple Silverlight application for use with the service. I followed these instructions (with a few modifications here and there) to create a Camtasia video. For output I selected the settings for a size of 640 x 480 with best quality video and audio. The file size for the resulting 12 minute .wmv file was 33 MB.

Figure 1. A sample video served from Silverlight Streaming (click to play)

For comparison purposes, I also created a Flash version of this screen cast, using equivalent settings for size and quality. The file size for the resulting .flv file was 40.1 MB.