What an Architect Should Know About Smooth Streaming

Ever wondered what it takes to deliver a really good streaming video experience over the web? Think it’s only possible if you have the infrastructure, resources, and bandwidth of a major CDN (Content delivery network) provider? Microsoft has created a new technology called Smooth Streaming (or Smooth HD) which allows adaptive streaming of Silverlight content over HTTP. What this means is that the video file can leverage edge servers and cache services plus the Smooth streaming client will automatically detect the clients bandwidth and hardware capabilities and adjust the video quality to give them the best experience. So, if the bandwidth is low the client will request the lower bit-rate version of the subsequent files.