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Google’s DoubleClick unit (whose acquisition was the source of much Microsoft rancor) announced today that it has added Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 to the video technologies in which it can serve video ads with its In-Stream advertising platform. This is just in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which in the USA are Silverlight powered online.
Today, DoubleClick, a premier provider of digital marketing technology and services, announced the new capability to serve video ads into Microsoft Silverlight 2 video environments. The move is part of DoubleClick’s ongoing effort to help clients maximize the yield on their advertising inventory as they deliver content into emergent online, video and mobile channels.
With this new feature of DoubleClick In-Stream, DoubleClick clients such as NBC Universal Digital Media are able to monetize video content played within the Silverlight 2 player. NBCOlympics.com, a division of NBC Universal, will be one of the first sites to open Silverlight 2 content up to advertisers with DoubleClick In-Stream. The solution carves out new video inventory across 2,500 hours of video content running as part of NBC’s Olympics coverage.
There should be no surprise here. Even though Google and Microsoft aren’t the best of pals, it is a win for both parties for DoubleClick to add Silverlight 2 to its In-Stream video stable (which already includes Adobe Flash, RealMedia, and Windows Media) and for Microsoft to get DoubleClick support.
Microsoft’s new “Flash killer” Silverlight technology has hit a speed bump as revealed in Ina Fried’s report that Gotuit Media filed suit July 2 in San Francisco Federal Court claiming that Silverlight violated several of its patents related to video metadata. Gotuit Media seems to be a real company (one of whose shareholders is Motorola) with real products and apparently the video metadata patents are among the company’s crown jewels. Microsoft says that they have not been served yet and have no comment.
There has been some commentary that Gotuit just wants to cut a piece of Microsoft’s Olympic pie for themselves, but while the Gotuit filing does mention the Olympics as an illustration of the use of video metadata, I see no evidence that they are trying for an immediate injunction before the Olympics start next month. Moreover, the suggested date for the case management conference is in October. None of this means that Gotuit’s claim is valid, but merely that this suit looks like more than a patent troll trying for an easy payday.
Bill Gates made a valedictory appearance at this year’s TechEd and along with a Steve Ballmer robot had some some development related announcements:
Not on the formal program was a certain amount of uncertainty over the arrival of SQL Server 2008:
He said Microsoft’s SharePoint Server would become the first Microsoft product to use enterprise search from its Fast Search and Transfer acquisition. The delayed SQL Server will be next. "Think of it as SQL Server, but it’s really Fast," he said.
For all the talk of data services, there was still no date on the next edition of SQL Server. Demonstrating SQL Server 2008, Dave Campbell, from Microsoft’s data storage platform division said SQL Server 2008 would be available in the "next month or two."
SQL Server 2008 is due in 3Q so it is not really past its latest due date. Fast Search & Transfer was acquired by Microsoft in January.
Microsoft announced today that starting in 2009 all Hewlett-Packard consumer Windows PCs distributed in the USA and Canada will be preloaded with Live Search as the default Web search engine in Internet Explorer and with a custom Live Search enabled toolbar featuring their Silverlight technology. HP had previously been signed up with Yahoo.
Danny Sullivan has a nice table of PC OEMs, their US market share, and the search engine they have signed up with and adding HP clearly is a leg up for Microsoft since HP is a strong number 2 (24%) to Dell (31%) who signed with Google in 2006. Before this HP deal, Microsoft only had Lenovo whose US share was minimal.
The question, of course, is how many users actually stick with the OEM presets for IE or change them or switch to Firefox (which defaults to Google). All of the search engines track the sourcing from toolbars and preloads (use one of them for a search query and check the parameters on the URL) so they have a good idea on traffic and ROI at least after one of these deals is started, but Microsoft undoubtedly has more than ROI on their mind.
First Microsoft has to grow beyond their single digit Web search share if their advertising aspirations are to be realized and this is one way of doing that. Second, a Silverlight toolbar means a Silverlight preload which Microsoft had yet to ante up for with the OEMs and that’s critical if they expect to get their Adobe Flash killer off the ground. There’s been no insight into what sort of bidding went on for the HP eyeballs, but there are lots of reasons why Microsoft would not want to be outbid.
This week the US National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) are holding their annual convention and Microsoft was there touting their wares. The big Microsoft news was the announcement of some new reference content provider customers and the promise for later this year of DRM (AKA copy protection) for their Silverlight “Flash killer”:
Today Microsoft unveiled details of Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady, the content protection support coming later this year in Silverlight. Silverlight DRM builds on Microsoft’s extensive expertise and experience in content protection and support for hundreds of millions of media players and devices worldwide.
In addition to being compatible with the broadly deployed base of Windows Media DRM 10 content, Silverlight DRM will support live streaming, on-demand streaming and progressive downloads for connected experiences. With the extensibility and openness of Silverlight, third-party solution providers will also be able to build and offer content owners additional choices for their media protection needs.
Microsoft apparently intends to continue their dominance in commercial media DRM software and connoisseurs of the genre will recognize PlayReady as Microsoft’s DRM successor to the the ill-fated PlaysForSure technology that Microsoft threw overboard (along with some unfortunate partners) when they released the Zune.
Other announcements:
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