14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest statistics from Internet metrics company comScore, "77.6 million viewers watched 3.2 billion videos on YouTube.com (41.6 videos per viewer)" in December 2007 alone, and taking into consideration only U.S. users. This gives Google no less than 32.6% of all the videos served in the last month of the past year, as well as a 43% of all U.S. Internet users. And still, the next YouTube killers might be growing as we speak, courtesy of Microsoft which has made available Video.Show 1.0 as a free download.
"Getting started with Video.Show is easy: all you need is a machine with Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005 Express and Expression Encoder; the software is built to guide you through a few simple configuration steps (setting an admin password and obtaining a Silverlight Streaming key), and then you're up and running. The application is broadly licensed for commercial or non-commercial purposes and full source code is available for review or modification. For an end-user, we've designed Video.Show to be straightforward to use, both for uploading new videos and for browsing existing videos," explained Tim Sneath, Microsoft group manager for client platforms.
Via Video.Show 1.0 Microsoft is essentially offering the resources necessary to build a user-generated video content site. Video.Show 1.0 is of course centered on Microsoft technologies and, in this context, focused on the Silverlight solution, whereas YouTube, and even the Redmond company's own MSN Video are using Adobe's Flash. But even with an infrastructure based on Silverlight, Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming through Windows Live, users will be able to set up in no time a website designed to permit visitors to upload, encode, catalog and publish video content, as well as indulge in social networking after the new viral Video.Show 1.0 hotspot has been created.
"From a developer perspective, Video.Show was designed to be a showcase of our full web technology platform. It's said from time to time that beautiful code has more to do with art than science: it's easy to see what the code does without reference to documentation or comments because it's clearly laid out and makes good use of the underlying platform to minimize unnecessary cruft. When I look at the way Video.Show uses LINQ to SQL to manage the various different data sources, I see some of that elegance in play - it's genuinely a pleasure to browse through the source code and see how things are done. Video.Show uses Silverlight for the player experience, of course; the videos themselves are uploaded to the Silverlight Streaming content distribution network, so the server bandwidth hosting requirements are pretty lightweight," Sneath added.