H.264 coming to Silverlight at last

Stephen Withers
Friday, 12 September 2008 13:03

Business IT - Technology

For broadcasters and other content creators, this means there will be less need to transcode video for different purposes.

"Using Silverlight, we are very excited to be able to offer the same advanced features and high-quality video to customers both on Windows and Mac browsers," said Pierre Brossard, CEO of French broadcaster TF1.

"In addition, through Microsoft's announced support for MP4 standard formats in Silverlight, we’ll be able to easily repurpose existing libraries of H.264 and AAC content and extend the future reach of our service to an ever-growing market of MP4-capable devices." (H.264 is part of the MPEG-4 standard.)

Microsoft also used IBC2008 to announce the co-development of a system for the management and distribution of digital terrestrial TV content over the Internet, an advertising system for the Mediaroom IPTV platform, and Protected Broadcast Driver Architecture (PBDA).

PBDA - which supersedes BDA (Broadcast Driver Architecture) - makes it possible for the manufacturers of TV tuners to accommodate broadcast content protection schemes in their products for Windows Media Center.

"For the first time, we're enabling those in the PC-TV community to build tuners and integrate almost any broadcast service into Windows Media Center themselves regardless of geographic location or television standard — we've removed a major roadblock by delivering one consistent platform for the industry," said Geoff Robertson, general manager for Windows Media Center at Microsoft.

"The tremendous response we're already seeing for the platform means PC OEMs, broadcast service providers and tuner-makers can now collaborate and embrace the PC as a first-class citizen for delivering more high-quality free or pay content to consumers in their local markets," he added.

It's funny the way vendors can make technology sound like a good thing even when it's designed to make it harder for us to watch TV the way we want to. The music industry is finally realising that DRM isn't the way to go, so it's a shame the TV and movie makers don't seem to be able to learn from that experience.