Quote:
Originally Posted by benwaggoner
Sometimes I think of it as a dead-end waste of time. But Smooth Streaming begat DASH. VC-1 yielded a good licensing regieme for H.264.
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It is interesting to see now 10 years later which MSFT technologies from those days ended up having the biggest impacts on the industry. Microsoft PIFF, which was based on ISOBMFF, led to MPEG CMAF and CENC (as well as the ill-fated UltraViolet Common File Format). Smooth Streaming, which was essentially PIFF + XML manifests, led to MPEG DASH. Silverlight (may it rest in peace) MediaStreamSource API established the web app media extensibility model that became HTML5 Media Source Extensions (MSE).
VC-1, as you noted, drove MPEG-LA to improve H.264 licensing terms, and it ended up powering the first 2-3 years of all HD optical discs, not to mention early Netflix streaming.
So all in all... Even though the individual products failed to win significant market share (mostly thanks to Microsoft's inability to stay focused on digital media for more than 4 years at a time), I think the underlying tech ultimately had a much bigger long-term impact than any of the products it was originally invented for.