DirectShow vs Media Foundation vs Media Platform

Exploring Microsoft Media Platform and How it Uses HTML5

Haven't heard of Microsoft Media Platform? A tech evangelist explains that it combines several well known applications.

By Troy Dreier
Posted on March 28, 2012

What was Microsoft doing at the recent HTML5 Video Summit in Los Angeles? Explaining to the audience how its video solutions take advantage of HTML5. The session was led by Alex Zambelli, media platform evangelist for Microsoft, who understood that much of the audience likely hadn't heard of the Microsoft Media Platform before.

"Probably the first question on your mind today might be, 'What is the Microsoft Media Platform?' It's a term that we haven't necessarily been using for a long time. We've been developing a lot of media technologies at Microsoft over the past several years, some of them independently and then some of them to work together. We've always been using them to build media solutions and so we come to think of them as a media platform and we decided we should put together some umbrella brand for these technologies. That's really what Microsoft Media Platform is: it's an umbrella brand for a set of Microsoft technologies that you use to encode, deliver, protect, play back video really to build internet media streaming solutions," said Zambelli.

So while attendees might not know the term "Microsoft Media Platform," they're probably already familiar with several of the product it contains.

"The Microsoft Media Platform really encompasses a number of other Microsoft technologies that you might know by other names. This is a good overview, for example, of what goes into Microsoft Media Platform. Probably starting from what I would consider the first step in the path of delivering and building a media solution would be the services. Basically, how do we deliver the media. Today we have two primary components that we use to deliver media. That would be Windows Server, using IIS Media Services -- that's our on-premises technology for building media servers. And then we have Windows Azure, which is becoming more and more important as we transition to the cloud," added Zambelli.

For more, including the role of HTML5 in the Microsoft Media Platform, watch the video below:



Microsoft Media Platform and HTML5

Microsoft Media Platform is a complete set of technologies for digital media encoding, protection, delivery, and playback. In this session we will explore the role of HTML5 in the Microsoft Media Platform: encoding HTML5-compatible media content using Expression Encoder; delivering media to HTML5 browsers over HTTP networks using IIS Media Services; playing back video and audio in Internet Explorer with full utilization of hardware-accelerated decoding; building HTML5 player applications using the MMP Player Framework; and finally, leveraging the intuitiveness and simplicity of HTML5 to build rich media apps for Windows 8.

Speaker: Alex Zambelli, Media Platform Evangelist, Microsoft
Speaker: Mike Downey, Principal Evangelist, Media Platform, Microsoft