Hey everybody, Microsoft is making an attempt at entering the online media realm!

And they’re taking on the big boys like Flickr and YouTube with an all encompassing digital media hub.

Yes, it’s true. Haven’t you heard? Shocking it is that the world has so far failed to take notice of this revelation. 

Much notice, anyway. As reported in CNET’s Webware publication – and not many news outlets elsewhere – Redmond has let known its intentions (via a job posting, no less) to make itself a much more viable competitor in the realm of online media.

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A host of media companies have launched a new push to force user generated content sites such as YouTube to tighten up their copyright controls.

Disney, CBS, NBC, and Fox, along with Microsoft, Veoh, and Dailymotion, have jointly issued a document they call “User Generated Content Principles.” 

In a nutshell, the guidelines call for sites hosting UGC to automatically block content that matches copyrighted material submitted by copyright owners to a back-end database.

Nothing New

These aren’t new proposals—the studios have been pressing for automated filtering on YouTube and the like for quote some time now. But the presentation of these proposals as a set of “principles” is new, and somewhat misleading.

Typically, we see voluntary guidelines issued by industry groups as a self-regulatory measure, to ensure best practices are followed in the absence of regulation. But here, it’s not self-regulation—the biggest names in the UGC business aren’t there. 

Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Yahoo are all noticeably absent from the video sharing services, as are a number of other channels for UGC, like blogs and other forums that allow the posting of media. Those who are present are those who would seek to regulate the business of others.

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Viacom, Disney, Microsoft, and MySpace all have a couple of things in common?

Apart from being huge media companies with a lot of financial clout, they also want to set some “guidelines” in order to maintain copyrights online.

The four (seems a strangely small group considering the proportions of the effort, no?) have joined hands to work to establish a commonly acceptable system which will purportedly “stop pirated material” from proliferating and generally protect copyright rules from widespread subversion.

And all four will fail at the job. Well, okay, maybe they will, maybe they won’t. To tell you the truth, I’ve no clue how things will shake out. 

But I kind of find it troubling that corporations are working in unison on technologies to address the issue of peer-to-peer piracy and whatnot, rather than, you know, the institution whose role it is to protect copyright law: government. 

So troubling, in fact, that one can’t help but get a little suspicious about the true intentions of this wee project they’ve all bandied together on.

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Microsoft have announced the forthcoming release of Internet TV, a feature which will allow people to enjoy a range of television and video content on their PCs and TV sets without a TV tuner in their PC.

On September 28th 2007, US users of Windows Vista Home Premium edition and Windows Vista Ultimate edition will find the new beta release inside Media Center.

The free service will be supported by advertising from YuMe Networks, which, interestingly enough, is a competitor of Podaddies which has recently been working with Apple.

At launch, expect over 100 hours of streaming content including full episodes of various television shows, full-length music concerts by popular artists, movie trailers, MSNBC news segments and sports clips from FOX Sports.

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LiveStation is a new IPTV service that lets you watch television online using Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology.

The service, which just debuted at IBC 2007 in Amsterdam is another addition to the growing list of IPTV services that allow broadband users to watch television programming through the Internet.

LiveStation has some key differences that make it unlike any of the other internet television services available, which actually make it more like traditional television. 

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When trying to create cross platform media experiences for use on the web, there are only a few options open to you. Now we have a new one on the table which could one day become the new standard.

Microsoft has recently released Version 1.0 of Silverlight and of special interest is their Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ which gives small content producers and developers 4GB of server space from which to experiment with the platform.

The service offers web designers and developers a free and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows™ and Mac.

Combined with the ability to create content with Microsoft® Expression Studio and other 3rd party tools, Web designers and content publishers wishing to integrate Silverlight applications into their online properties can enjoy complete control of the end user experience.

Currently, video must be less then 22 MB which works out to 10mins of content encoded at 300Kbps. VC-1 and WMV are the supported video formats.

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The release candidate (RC) of the long awaited Microsoft Silverlight multimedia authoring, encoding and user platform, a direct competitor to the Adobe Flash environment, has been released.

Silverlight’s cross-browser, cross-platform approach targets content providers who distribute video and rich media over the Internet; developers and designers who build rich interactive applications; and end users who seek a better quality experience in viewing Web-based media.

The Major League Baseball playoffs will use Silverlight as their new online video platform. Microsoft also has Silverlight partners in Akamai Technologies, Brightcove, Eyeblaster, and Netflix.

Whether Silverlight will make as small a dent in Adobe’s dominance in the field as Microsoft’s XPS did to PDF remains to be seen.

[Via PC Magazine]