Snowball - The Blog

In my busy time (see previous post), some really interesting case studies were released.

• On iis.net, a huge white paper was posted on the Sunday Night Football site. This site, which may not be known to European readers as much, is now built entirely on Silverlight 3 backed by IIS Smooth Streaming. The latter, an ability to dynamically adapt the bit rate of the video stream, is unique in a RIA technology: for example Flash does not have this on board. This way, viewers with lower bandwidth or slower PC processors frequently experience long periods of video buffering, stuttering, and degraded picture quality. Silverlight solves this. The white paper can be read at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/808/sunday-night-football-live-in-hd-with-microsoft-silverlight-3-and-iis-smooth-streaming/
• The second interesting case study can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005861%0d . This case describes the use of Windows Azure by Outback Steakhouse. Outback was looking for a social networking presence but did not know what to expect in visitor numbers. Windows Azure offered them exactly what they needed.