Microsoft announced today a series of summer events called Zune Live at the BBQ which aim to “celebrate hip-hop music and the community that surrounds it.” Here are the details on tickets and artists:

The concert hits Los Angeles on July 12, Chicago on July 22, and New York City on Aug. 4. Viral invitations will be sent to fans, and they will be asked to register at a special Web site to receive their ticket.

Artists confirmed to participate in Live at the BBQ include Common, David Banner, UGK, Mos Def, Bilal, Clipse, Collie Budz, E-40, Cham, and Large Professor.

Viral invitations? What does that even mean?

Looks like it doesn’t matter. All you have to do is register at the Zune Live at the BBQ website. You need to give your name, email, date of birth, and phone number.

If you’re in one of the three lucky cities, have fun!

In about an hour (at 3:30 PM PDT) Boeing will premiere their brand new airplane, the 787 Dreamliner. You can watch the event live via 35 international satellite networks, or over the web. And guess what? They’re using Windows Media:

The 787 Rollout live streaming event is encoded in the Windows Media format.

If you are using the Mozilla Firefox browser, you must have the Windows Media Player Firefox plug-in in order to view the live broadcast.

I haven’t really seen anyone but Microsoft mention the Firefox plug-in, so that’s kind of neat! You can download it here.

The live 787 Dreamliner Premiere site is here. More information on the new plane can be found here.

Enjoy!

Microsoft has released a press release saying that as of 3 PM EDT today, they had received a total of more than 10 million video streams for the Live Earth concerts at MSN. Additionally, they’ve had the most simultaneous viewers of any online concert ever.

“History is being made today,” said Joanne Bradford, corporate vice president and chief media officer of MSN. “Millions of people around the world have joined together to fight the climate crisis. The over 10 million streams MSN has delivered so far today represent a milestone in live Internet broadcasting. We expect to see an even greater number of streams after the concerts are over as people return to watch their favorite performances or enjoy them for the first time if they missed the concerts live.”

I will definitely be one of the individuals going back to watch performances again, as I missed both Linkin Park and Rihanna in Tokyo. I watched some of the streams online this afternoon, and I was really impressed with the quality and performance.

We’ve come a long way from the “heyday” of streaming in the late 90s. It’s actually possible to have an enjoyable streaming experience over the web now!

Well done, MSN.

Video search company Truveo received a lot of press back in June when Comscore reported that Truveo had 40 million monthly unique visitors and was growing at about 50% per month. Fairly impressive. They were acquired by AOL back in 2006, but lately they have been making deals with other firms, as TechCrunch noted:

The company is also partnering outside of AOL to get broader distribution for the engine. Brightcove, Clevver, CSTV, Flock, Pageflakes, PureVideo, Qwest, Search.com, Sportingo, Netvibes, Widgetbox and YourMinis all now use Truveo for video search, joining existing partners AOL Video, AOL Search, Excite, Infospace.

Notably absent from that list are Microsoft sites.

Yet they are using Truveo too! I am not sure when they started, but WindowsMedia.com displays a “Powered by Truveo” graphic at the bottom of every search results page. And there appears to be no preference for Microsoft properties either. A search for Transformers returns videos from AP, AOL News, Yahoo News, MSN UK, and MSN.com, in that order.

I’m not sure that the Live Search team is happy about this, but it’s good for users. Truveo’s search results are quite good.

I think Microsoft’s television strategy is pretty clear: throw as many ideas and products out there as you can and see what sticks. With MSN TV, Mediaroom, Windows Media Centre, and a number of other products, you’d think Microsoft would be content to improve what they already have. But no, today they announced LiveStation, a P2P live television broadcasting application built using Silverlight.

The project is a joint venture between Microsoft Research and UK-based Skinkers. Don Dodge has more on the technology behind LiveStation:

LiveStation is built on two research technologies, Pastry and SplitStream, from Microsoft’s Cambridge Research Lab. Pastry is a type of P2P system called a ‘distributed hash table,’ which makes it easier for computers to find and store information, and to organize themselves for collaborative tasks. Splitstream is an application built on top of Pastry which allows real-time streams such as live video to be robustly distributed peer-to-peer.

TechCrunch wrote about LiveStation today too:

And while it is certainly an excellent demonstration of the flexibility of Silverlight, its not even close to being productized and launched. For now, consider it little more than a pretty video.

True enough. You can watch that video here. LiveStation is currently in closed beta. I entered my email at the beta site, so hopefully I’ll get an invite soon.

For more on this story, check out TechMeme.

UPDATE: Long Zheng makes the very good point that
LiveStation isn’t really a Microsoft product.

The New York Times ran an article on Monday about the Xbox Live Marketplace (XBLM), the “virtual market” that launched in November of last year (and which received it’s very own blade in the Spring 2007 update). Though still not available in Canada, I am quite interested in the service. The article includes a general overview and some interesting statistics:

Microsoft declined to give revenue figures for the service, but claims it has grown by double-digit figures each month since it was introduced.

The service currently offers more than 2,000 hours of programming. To prevent piracy, consumers have 24 hours to watch rented material before it is automatically expunged from the console’s hard drive.

I think Microsoft was smart to launch the service when they did. There’s a lot of room for improvement, but gaming consoles are definitely morphing into something more - call them entertainment consoles. Thanks to XBLM, Microsoft has a good lead over competitors.

Speaking of improvements, why not make it possible to synchronize content with the Zune? Currently it’s a one-way relationship: nothing leaves the Xbox 360.

Really though, I’d be happy if they launched XBLM here in Canada!

I went to launch Windows Media Encoder earlier today, and accidently clicked on “Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition” instead. Instead of the application opening, I was presented with this error message:

Didn’t see that coming! I am a digital pack rat, so I still have the setup file - I downloaded it on October 3rd, 2006. I remember installing Studio Edition and having a quick look around, but I promptly forgot all about it.

Until today, that is.

So off to the Windows Media Encoder downloads page I go. Turns out the Studio Edition beta is history:

Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition Beta 1 is no longer available. Please visit the Windows Media Software Products Vendor page to learn about third-party products that provide advanced Windows Media Video encoding.

A quick search revealed no further information. I have no idea when the download disappeared.

Does anyone know what happened to Windows Media Encoder Studio Edition? My guess is that it was discontinued in favor of the Expression Media Encoder, but I am not sure. At least the latter product has a shorter name!

Leave me a comment if you have any details, thanks!

Are you ready for some very unscientific research? Okay good, here we go! I was poking around Facebook today, as I often do, when I decided it would be a good idea to search for “Zune” just to see what came up. Turns out there are 139 groups on Facebook with “Zune” in the title or description. Are these good or bad groups, I thought?

I went through the entire list, and found 85 groups that were directly related to the Zune. Of these, 16 were negative, 38 were positive, and 31 were neutral. Negative groups include those titled like “ZUNE SUCKS!!!” whereas positive groups include those titled like “ZUNE ROCKS!!!” And neutral groups are basically those that didn’t seem to lean one way or the other. The largest group, with 968 members, is titled “Dude, I got a Zune, where’s yours?”

A search for “ipod” returns over 500 groups, as does a search for “iphone”. It’s clear that Microsoft has some catching up to do. Surely some of those ipod/iphone groups are negative, but like the saying goes, there’s no such thing as negative press!

I guess the Zune team should be encouraged that the positive groups outnumber the negative ones. Lots of room for improvement, however!

Remember Windows DreamScene? It’s one of the “Windows Ultimate Extras” that Microsoft promised for Windows Vista Ultimate users. DreamScene makes it possible to use video and other animations as desktop wallpaper. The first demo was shown months ago, but we haven’t heard much since then - until now. Finally, the team has provided an update:

Our goal is to provide the highest-quality, most secure and reliable offerings, and as a result we are continuing our work on these offerings. We apologize for taking so long to provide a status update to customers.

We intend to ship Windows DreamScene and the remaining 20 Language Packs by the end of the summer.

About time. DreamScene supports both MPEG and WMV video files, so start collecting your favorite videos now!

For more on the news, check out Megite.

We’re less than five days away from one of the biggest musical events in history - Live Earth. Here’s a description of the event, spearheaded by Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore:

Live Earth is a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.

If you can’t attend one of the concerts in person, don’t worry. In addition to being broadcast on television and satellite radio, the concerts will be streamed online at MSN. About an hour ago a press release was issued that sheds some light on the technology behind the streaming. Incited Media has been contracted to provide the streams:

Incited’s team of roughly 80 technicians will be streaming nine live feeds (eight stages plus a world feed) to liveearth.msn.com. Incited will have 7 EVS systems editing individual songs and 27 servers in a VOD encoding “farm” going at all times as well as 24 live encoders for the Windows Media and QuickTime streams.

I find it hard to believe that MSN would feature QuickTime streams on the site, but you never know. They have a nice Zune logo on the site, as well as some big ads! In any case, you’ll be able to watch Live Earth online using Windows Media.

I’ll be watching!

CNN officially launched their new, redesigned website today. The site, which has been in beta for a few weeks, includes many “web 2.0″ features like user generated content, podcasts, and a clean, simple layout. For a great overview of the new site, check out Read/WriteWeb.

Video (and multimedia in general) is a major feature of the new site. In the past CNN has been a major user of Windows Media formats, but that has changed with the redesign. All videos are now encoded to Flash (FLV) meaning you no longer need to have Windows Media Player installed to view them.

In fact, the only feature I can see that still uses Windows Media is the radio stream. The site says Live Video is coming soon, and that may use Windows Media as well. Otherwise, everything is either Flash or MP3/M4V (podcasts).

All video content at CNN.com is free, so they have no need for DRM. Thus, it makes sense to move from Windows Media to Flash, as more users/computers have Flash installed than Windows Media Player.

This seems to be a growing trend - moving video content to Flash. Call it the YouTube effect I guess. I wonder if Silverlight will do anything to stop this? Windows Media and the other codecs that Silverlight support offer much higher quality than Flash.

Time will tell!