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.

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!

The BBC has announced a launch date for iPlayer, it’s on demand TV service. Starting July 27th, users will be able to use the software to download popular BBC content seven days after its first transmission. Nothing has changed on the technology front - it will still be Windows-only initially, and it will still use Windows Media DRM (the BBC website says it will work with Windows Media Player 10 or above). The application will be improved too:

Over time other features will be added to the iPlayer including live streaming of programmes, the BBC Radio Player and “series stacking”, which will allow users to download episodes from series retrospectively.

Director General Mark Thompson compared the launch of iPlayer to the launch of color television (which the BBC introduced 40 years ago) in terms of its impact. I think that remains to be seen, but the BBC could indeed be on to something.

I was reading some blog posts about the launch date news, and came across Tim Anderson’s post. He’s excited for the software, but worries that using Microsoft technology could doom the software:

This aspect bothers me as well, not only because of cross-platform issues, but because I question whether Microsoft is able to deliver DRM that just works.

Umm, can you give me an example of any other DRM that “just works”? I don’t think you can use DRM and “just works” in the same sentence, at least not from the consumer’s point of view. Like the Open Source Consortium, I think Tim has picked the wrong enemy.