The beta of Smooth Streaming (as well as Live Smooth Streaming) is now available! Learn more at http://www.iis.net/media .

Hi, Roger, That is a concise summary! :-) I'd make just two clarifications, both to your last sentence: Windows Media audio and video files can be downloaded intact and played; progressively downloaded and played (playing starts even while the content is still downloading, typically from a Web server...

To follow up on #2, you now have more choices for creating Smooth Streaming content. This week, Inlet Technologies announced full encoding support for both Live and on-demand Smooth Streaming, in both their Spinnaker and Armada products. Read about it here: http://inlethd.com/download.php?mode=getFile&type...

You are correct - as a supplemental Server Role for Windows Server, the only cost for Windows Media Services is for the operating system itself.

The beta release of Live Smooth Streaming was announced yesterday at the MIX09 conference. This functionality is based on Smooth Streaming, and enables adaptive streaming of live events to Silverlight clients. What are your thoughts and questions about Live Smooth Streaming? We'd love to hear them...

Hi, Galgamesh, Yes, Web Playlists automatically obfuscate the URLs in each playlist. By default, each user gets personalized URLs to the original media, and Web Playlists enforces that only the original requester can play those URLs. For example, an entry in a typical Windows Media playlist (ASX file...

Hi, gkhniis, WMS supports streaming of .asf, .wma, .wmv, .jpg, .jpeg, and .mp3 file types. Unfortunately, it does not support .wav or .avi files. Please see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731194.aspx for more information. If you don't mind me asking, where did the quoted file types...

Hi, VA, Answers to your questions... 1. WMS can provide the older Intelligent Streaming feature, but to get the latest adaptive streaming functionality, you will need IIS Smooth Streaming running on IIS 7.0. 2. Currently, Microsoft Expression Encoder 2 SP1 is required to create IIS Smooth Streaming content...

Hi, Seatac, It sounds as if you have set this up properly for running IIS and WMS side-by-side. I think there may be another issue at play here, which can happen in some situations when your WMS 2008 server is behind a NAT firewall, proxy server, or load balancer. Please see this MSDN blog post for information...

Hi, Galgamesh, There are several ways to change or hide the link to your media files. The most appropriate solution will depend on what your setup and scenario are. Can you tell us more about how users are accessing the content today? Is it acceptable for a given user to access the content multiple times...