MIX 2010 – Day 0: Eat your veggies

MIX 2010 Day 0. Day 0. You read that right. I’m not trying to be nerdy. Tomorrow is technically Day 1, so what else should I call it? Suck it up.

Workshops. Every year the same thing. This workshop was awesome but the other one sucked. In an attempt to avoid negativity, I’ll just stick with the one I liked. “Media Processing Workflow” with Alex Zambelli: A surprisingly enjoyable and informative mix of high and low level technologies that combine to deliver optimum online video streaming experiences.

Although I’m not certain that Alex’s presentation was organized well by design, the net effect was an interesting overview of the processes and architectures required to deliver professional media productions. And this was important for me—someone who hasn’t dipped his toes into the streaming technologies in more than seven years.

I’m not going to go into all the details of Alex’s talk. Instead I’m going to add my own spin. And that’s precisely what I committed myself to doing. If you want someone to write a verbatim post on the talk, then go elsewhere. In fact, I’d prefer you went directly to Alex’s blog. http://www.alexzambelli.com

The thing I’d like to touch on that became clear to me as I sat in this presentation today was this: if someone has taken the time to understand the underlying protocols, these technologies seem more than intuitive—they seem obvious. Those who simply learn how to use tools without understanding the affects and effects are doomed to learning each new technology as if it’s yet another mountain.

I touched on it in another blog post a couple years ago, but I had a co-worker several years ago who had a disagreement with me on a choice of technologies. He was convinced that sticking closely to the patterns defined by Microsoft for ASP.NET and web forms was best for a number of reasons including that many developers already have skills in ASP.NET web forms.

I held that I didn’t feel that proficiency in ASP.NET web forms was requisite to being a web developer. I stated that I’d rather have a developer working for me who was familiar with HTTP. Then based on that knowledge he could adopt any number of server-side technologies to achieve his goals.

Alex Zambelli’s talk on HTTP Adaptive Streaming and IIS Smooth Streaming illustrates my point beautifully. His explanation of how the Adaptive Streaming pattern takes advantage of HTTP made the entire business of streaming media immediately accessible to me. I even found myself repeatedly asking my other self, “why didn’t this happen earlier? It makes perfect sense.”

In addition to immediately grasping the concept, I was soon dreaming up the possibilities that the GOP approach to delivering content fragments opened. Content indexing and annotation is now much easier than it has been in the past. Somebody, get a government grant for the arts to put together an art/wiki site where people upload videos and the site continuously streams 4-8 second fragments of each video and the video/audio switch between the fragments will be seamless.

What are we waiting for? There are so many obvious uses. Oh. Wait. They’re only obvious to those who understand the inherent beauty of the simplicity of the pattern. If you call yourself a web developer and you haven’t read the HTTP recommendations… do yourself a favor. RFC 2616