Until now, setting up an online video service was a complex undertaking and fraught with difficulties, and the process of preparing, loading, and delivering multimedia content, combined with the serving of appropriate advertising, required a lot of manual work and did not really scale very well.

This white paper introduces an end-to-end blueprint for video services delivered using the Web, developed by Microsoft and its partners. It encompasses business models for online video services, a sample client design providing a state-of-the-art user experience, and the back-end software architecture to support a commercial online video service. The front-end components not only deliver video, audio, images, and a variety of advertising formats, but they support different interaction models and combine a player functionality, content exploration and communications tools, community services, and customization options into a truly engaging user experience. The back-end software architecture shows how Microsoft® server products and services can be used for content loading and preparation, content protection, content delivery, content marketing, contextual and targeted advertising, customer relationship management (CRM), customer profiling, analytics, and reporting.

Our goal was to address the needs of those who produce, distribute, and deliver online video services to users via the Internet in a coherent and consistent way, end to end. As the market for online video services evolves, so will this blueprint. We understand that where you stand in the process defines your needs. This paper shows how you can use the Microsoft platform to overcome your specific challenges and stay one step ahead of the market.

In this white paper, Microsoft presents a blueprint architecture for the “back end”/”internal” software landscape of a media company, managing the entire digital media supply chain - from inception to pre-production, production, and delivery - from a resource, financial, and content perspective. This blueprint architecture shows how the Microsoft® platform and Microsoft (and partner) products can be combined into an overall solution for supporting the digital media supply chain, and it is based on design principles like SOA, software-plus-services, scalability, openness, extensibility, and configurability.

Media and entertainment companies today face unprecedented opportunities in the markets they serve. Advertising, broadcasting, film, music, and publishing companies may employ different business models and pursue different goals, but share several critical concerns. The rapid, continuing shift from analog to digital creation, management, and distribution of content has opened many doors, but presents new challenges as well.

This paper explores both the business rationale for SOA, as well as the Microsoft “real world” approach to SOA. Microsoft has a comprehensive SOA offering that provides developers, architects and IT professionals with the tools, technologies, framework and guidance for building and maintaining SOA solutions, as well as the personal productivity software that enables business users to streamline and optimize business processes in a manner that increases productivity, lowers costs, and promotes organizational agility.

In this white paper, learn the basics of the Windows Workflow Foundation, how this technology has been integrated into both Windows SharePoint Services and the 2007 Office System, and how to benefit from workflows applied to business processes.

This white paper describes key scenarios for delivering downloadable and streaming Windows Media audio and video content to mobile devices, and identifies the Windows Media components that are necessary to implement these scenarios.

The primary goal of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is to help developers create attractive and effective user interfaces. Learn how the WPF unified platform helps make designers active participants in creating user interfaces, and provides a common programming model for standalone and browser applications.

Microsoft's Xbox Live video download service is a good strategic move for Microsoft to establish a position in the emerging video download market and broaden the appeal of Xbox in its battle with the upcoming PS3.