You may have heard of Silverlight, our Rich Internet Applications framework – and if you haven’t, you’re sure to hear more about it this summer, as it’ll be used on the NBC site to stream Olympics videos. But you don’t have to be NBC to take advantage of Silverlight video streaming – or know anything about Silverlight development.
Our friends over on the Windows Live Dev team have had a hosted Silverlight Streaming service up and running for a little while now. You can upload your own videos (in pretty much any format) and we’ll transcode them into streaming format and give you a nice little snippet of HTML that you can include on your own website to embed your streamed video whereever you like. And the quality is waaaaay better than those other guys – even if the content might be of questionable quality.
Why I’m telling you about it now is that we’re about to start a trial program where we insert ads into the video stream as overlays, and cut you in on the revenues. All you have to do is add a few keywords each time you upload a video and we’ll insert some relevant (and appropriate) advertising into the stream (see an example here – scroll down the page a little). So if you’ve been struggling to monetize your video content with something like AdSense, now’s your chance.
Sign up for Silverlight Streaming itself by clicking here – and if you want to sign up for the ads trial, click here. I’m afraid this trial is only open to US residents with a US Social Security number or tax ID right now; if you don’t have one of these, we can’t pay you, unfortunately.
I finally downloaded silverlight. Bit disappointed that the ads trial is only available in the US so I’ll just have to wait.
PS OMG, your daughter is just adorable!
If they could just increase the penetration of Silverlight by slip-streaming it into the next Windows Update…
Until then, the problem is that a) only about 17% of browsers have SL installed and b) an installation requires clients to restart the browser (hence losing most of your customers).