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.