Earlier this week, Roxio launched a beta of Roxio Buzz with Silverlight Streaming support.  What is Buzz? It's a simple tool for editing and publishing user-generated video to the Web. This thing is so simple my mother could use it.  Built with .NET (WPF), Buzz will encode and publish your video to a # of user-generated sites, or now, your free Silverlight Streaming account for embedding on your website.  Bloggers can now go forth and enjoy the 4GB of free goodness.  Could a Windows Live Writer plug-in be around the corner? A friend tells me, "Yes".  

S itting in Newark Liberty Airport and catching up before my flight.  As announced in Bill Gates' keynote at WinHEC this week, 81 entries into the NextGen Windows PC competition were entered, and the three winners were announced, complete with a few physical prototypes showcased by CNET. It's great to see this program live on from when we first launched it two years ago.  The entries are definitely evolving into some very cool designs.

This is what happens when my worlds collide.  Feel free to listen in on my chat with Ian Dixon of The Media Center Show about Silverlight.

This weekend, you can experience the Xbox Elite campaign in Silverlight on the Microsoft.com homepage.  Go check out the Xbxo 360 Elite in all its glory.  (Note: If you don't have the Silverlight Beta installed, you'll see a ribbon to see the site in Silverlight, note that Silverlight is in Beta).

This is only the beginning... Kudos to the Microsoft.com team on this pilot endeavor.  I'm off to NY tomorrow- spend Mother's Day with my mom (sorry honey) and then off to Streaming Media East.  It should be a fun time.

Last night, Scott Guthrie and a few of us on the Silverlight product team went to see Aerosmith in concert at the Mandalay Bay - something I've always wanted to do and it as worth every moment!

Tonight I finally met Dave Winer in person at a Blogger meetup.   Today was mostly partner meet & greets, keynote rehearsals (which look great) and a few other things. One of them was giving Jeff Sandquist a special edition Microsoft Silverlight skateboard- the same design seen in the intro video at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight.  He love skateboarding as do I.  The difference is tha the can actually skateboard.

These are special giveaways for partners and customers.  I've had to carry a few around the Venetian and keep getting stopped by security guards wanting to look at it, attendees etc.  I have one extra and will probably send it spontaneously to the person who does the most impressive Silverlight-enabled app about 30 days from now.   Heck, you might see a few given away at MIX07 :)

Tomorrow blogging is going to be a bit sporadic as I have a pretty tight schedule but will try to post as soon as possible - lots to talk about, so much good but will be covered elsewhere.

If' you're at MIX and want to meet up and discuss Silverlight's media capabilities, feel free to text me at +1-425-442-5712 or leave vmail (sporadic notification) and we'll try and meet up Tuesday or Wednesday. 

My trusty ipod is sitting in its docking station and awakes on it's own.  I hear  buzz buzz buzzing in my stereo speakers.  My Cingular Blackjack is sitting right next to the iPod.  What happens next?

The Blackjack continues buzzing from its data connection, picking up steam while my ipod starts to freak out- as if someone is randomly cycling up and down in the main menu, it goes into a full-on seizure.  Then I realize the two are in cycle.

Holy cow... and they say these phones don't cause cancer?  Anyone else see this kind of behavior before before?

I  love my TiVo Series 3.  It has a great Spousal Acceptance Factor (SAF) and though the price was crazy high, it has run flawlessly in our family room for months on end and I can't seem to fill it up with content.  

If you're interested in a Series 3, TiVo has a great deal at $499.99 + free TiVo Wireless adapter here.

Now if they can just get that whole TiVo to TiVo sharing feature running again...

To quote Allen:

The demo of LiveStation, which showed a good-quality picture from the BBC in the midst of a bandwidth-hogging tech show, has another thing going for it - its ability to leverage Microsoft's new Silverlight platform to create "content experiences" based on LiveStation's streams. Has interactive TV finally found its way to the consumer?

It's a good question, and I look forward to Skinker's public beta.  I've been playing with Joost as well, both are fine examples of what can be done.  It did occur to me that the Joost UI could be done in Silverlight, making it accessible everywhere the Silverlight client resides.  But for me, content is more important than the medium.  And my Slingbox is safely tethered to my TiVo for PVR supports for now. :)

I've received so many inquiries and kudos about the Silverlight name, logo, and brand video internally and externally that I thought I'd post the real story of how it came together.

• Naming research was completed in Q3 2006.  We decided to hold it for a special event at a later date.  "WPF/E"- the codename of Silverlight was intentionally unappealing to keep mainstream consumers from installing it until we had good feedback from the developers/designers during the alpha (CTP) preview.
• Brand work was done by my team working with an outstanding design firm I'll mention here once I have clearance to do so (by them).  We kicked this off in October, and went through many iterations before landing on the animated logo and final frame lockup.  If you don't like the frame, you can blame me Long :)  The orb is a plasmic energy being held into shape by an unseen force, where it spins and flows, almost organically.
• The brand video was done by Phoenix Edit, a group of ex-Industrial Light & Magic wonks out of San Francisco.    The goal was to show many different Silverlight-enabled scenarios woven together – designer/developer collaboration, personalized e-commerce, devices, user-generated video, viral sharing, and the network effect on sales. We intentionally avoided excessive use of text or voiceover so the video will translate globally as we kick off events around the world. For the line, "Light up the Web" - you have me to blame.  It's more about illumination and blazing a trail vs. blazing anything else ;)
• The music in the brand video is by my friend and prominent UK DJ Andy Hunter. The song is “Go” off his album, “Exodus”.  Andy consulted on the project and the remix, and has considerable street cred touring with DJ Tiesto. His songs have been used in The Matrix games, and multiple movie/television show. Andy is now on Nettwerk records working on his next release.
• Customer and partner engagement was tightly synchronized.  During initial briefs, partners were shown a slide announcing the final name as "X-Plat Player Plug-in for Browsers" in Microsoft logotype, a self-deprecating way of noting that we knew the name had to be cool and were on the ball (ironically or sadly some thought that was the actual name!).  We'd show the logo without the name, and always used the name "WPF/E" in our discussions and external communications.
• For the press announce, named companies didn't even know the final name until a matter of hours before the release hit. We intentionally didn't publish any brand elements internally and had about a dozen people total that had access.  The product management team got really tired of hearing me talk about secrecy and except for a few small nits that went unnoticed, they really did us proud.

Some day I'll post the evolution timeline of the logo if others are interested.

Every year, the publishers of Videography, DV, Digital Cinematography, and Television Broadcast magazines get together at NAB and announce the "Best of Show" award winners in multiple categories.

The Best of Show Awards are given in recognition of outstanding achievement in the advancement of the art and science of video technology, include the Videography Vidy Awards, the longest running NAB awards program, the Television Broadcast Top Innovation Awards, the DV Black Diamond Awards, and the Digital Cinematography Premiere Awards.

"To receive an award, a technology is evaluated by our panel of editors and industry experts," says NewBay Media Video Group Vice President/Group Publishing Director Doug Krainman. "The winning technologies reflect innovation and engineering excellence.

I'm elated to note that Microsoft Silverlight was the recipient of a coveted DV Black Diamond Award, in such esteemed company as Apple Final Cut Studio 2.  Congrats to the entire team!

Dan is one of the top movers/shakers in the online media space.  A veteran of Web 1.0, EVP of StreamingMedia.com and and Chairman of the Streaming Media conferences,  he recently started a blog and people are taking notice.  I first met Dan back at Streaming Media West 2001, in-between Steve Ballmer heckling me on-stage for using my wedding video in an end to end demo :). 

Dan gets our strategy with Silverlight for the media space.  Customers want a solution with the quality/reliability of Windows Media, standards-support of VC-1, and the interactivity only available from another provider today:

While the higher cost of creating and delivering in Flash over Windows Media has not stopped too many in the past, it has stopped some content creators from wanting to spend two to three times more just to use the Flash streaming format... If Silverlight truly does allow content owners to create, encode and deliver content faster and cheaper while providing the same if not better user experience than Flash streaming, then Microsoft is going to have the advantage in the long run.

Almost every broadcaster I speak to is looking with whetted appetite to the moment they can deliver HD video on the Web in a reliable and effective manner.  While everyone talks about the rapidly dropping price of bandwidth on the Web, we seem to neglect the actual cost of retraining designers to be developers (or vice versa), the production costs associated with creation of more complex, experience-centric websites, and the plain fact that more bits flowing through the "tubes" of the internet = more congestion, particularly at HD rates.  This is why we're investing so heavily in Silverlight for media, and adding new features such as SSL (https://), the same technology used to protect your credit card information, will now be used for over-the wire encryption of progressive streams from Windows Server code name "Longhorn" to Silverlight.  A certain broadcaster said they needed it and were concerned about proprietary protocols of other solutions that were recently reverse engineered.

Dan Rayburn - Subscribed.