According to Scott Fulton’s post, Microsoft has updated their IIS server with software that converts “Silverlight video” to a format that works on the iPhone. He quotes the Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb as saying that they are converting their Smooth Streaming video into the “MPEG2 v8″ format and using the HTML 5.0 video tag to tell Safari to fetch the video from IIS. What he specifically means is that Microsoft has adopted Apple’s method for H264 chunking and HTTP delivery, is embracing the HTML 5.0 video tag, and sees the iPhone as an important platform to target for online video delivery.
IE8 does not currently support the HTML 5.0 video tag, but hopefully IE9 will. Windows 7 has built-in support for the H264 codec so Microsoft has already dealt with the royalty issues surrounding H264 playback. I predict that Microsoft will enable standard H264 playback via the HTML 5.0 video tag in IE9 with Apple’s method of chunking and HTTP delivery. This will make their IIS server more valuable to those who distribute video on the Internet, including content delivery networks.
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