Overview

IIS Media Services is a set of media-related extensions for Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 that provides an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform. IIS Media Services 2.0 contains three extensions:

• Smooth Streaming – on-demand adaptive streaming to Silverlight
• Bit Rate Throttling – meters the speed that media is delivered to a player
• Web Playlists – secure sequencing of media content

You can also download two additional beta IIS Media Services extensions from the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) by selecting IIS Media Services 3.0 - Beta. The two additional beta extensions available are:

• Live Smooth Streaming – live adaptive streaming for Silverlight
• Advanced Logging – rich, real-time client- and server-side logging

To get the x32 version of IIS Media Services 2.0 RTW, click here.

Features

IIS Media Services 2.0 has the following features:

- Smooth Streaming

• Delivers continuous playback to Silverlight at the highest quality the end user conditions will support at any given moment
• Works with existing HTTP caches and caching networks
• Simple content management, with each quality level of video managed as a single file

- Bit Rate Throttling - significantly increases progressive download scalability while reducing bandwidth costs

- Web Playlists - enables server-side control of content and advertising, ensuring that you can protect, personalize, and monetize your media assets.

Benefits

IIS Media Services 2.0 offers the following advantages:

• Smooth Streaming can be less expensive to deploy, as it leverages existing HTTP caches and caching networks, rather than requiring specialized streaming servers at every node.
• Smooth Streaming offers better scalability and reach, reducing “last mile” issues because it can dynamically adapt to inferior network conditions as it gets closer to the user’s home.
• Smooth Streaming adapts to end user playback conditions, rather than requiring the content providers to guess which bit rates are most likely to be accessible to their audience.
• Bit Rate Throttling saves bandwidth costs by throttling the speed at which content is downloaded
• Bit Rate Throttling decreases network traffic by metering your media deliveries
• Monetize media assets with Web playlists that personalize content and prevent ad skipping
• Web Playlists let you intelligently deliver multiple media formats from a single server, including .wmv, .flv, and .mp4 files

Requirements

The following prerequisites must be fulfilled to run the IIS Media Services 2.0 installation package and install IIS Media Services 2.0:

• You must use IIS 7.0 running on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista® with Service Pack 1 (SP1).
• The IIS Management Console for Internet Information Services 7.0 must be installed to manage the IIS Media Services 2.0 modules using the IIS 7.0 user interface.
• You must install IIS Media Services 2.0 as an administrator.