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Microsoft on Tuesday offered a glimpse at the next version of its Windows Media products, including new server software and developer tools, and an improved encoding technology that it claims will allow broadband users to play digital audio and video files over the Internet as easily as changing channels on a TV.

Code-named Corona, the new products and technologies eventually will succeed Windows Media 8, which forms the basis of Microsoft's current media player included with the Windows XP operating system. The new products were due to be demonstrated on Tuesday at the Streaming Media East conference in New York.

Microsoft says it released a beta version of its Windows Media Services for Windows .Net Server. The software will allow users to stream files encoded in the new Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video formats from future Microsoft server products.

It includes a new feature called Fast Stream, which Microsoft says will enable digital files to be delivered over high-speed Internet connections without the use of buffering. Fast Stream is intended to create what Jonathan Usher, group product manager with Microsoft's Windows digital media division, calls "always-on access to media."

"It responds as quickly as when you change the channel on your TV," he says.

Wireless Media

Windows Media Services will also add new features for improving the quality of media files streamed to wireless devices, the company says.

By early next year, Microsoft says it will release the remaining parts of its new media platform, including a software development kit for developers and two new encoding technologies, known as codecs (for compression/decompression), for compressing WMA and WMV files for delivery across the Internet.

Promising 20 percent improved quality over Windows Media 8 with the new codecs, audio files will have better-than-CD quality and video images will appear as sharp as high-definition television, according to Usher.

As well as improving playback quality for end users, the new media format should benefit content makers who pay for bandwidth to deliver media across the Internet, Usher says. A full-length movie, for instance, will be compressible to 400MB, rather than 500MB using the current WMV file format, he says.

Content delivery networks charge for bandwidth at a rate of about $0.01 per 2MB, Usher says, so the new file formats should allow content makers to reduce the cost of delivering content. "The tighter you can pack it down, the less you pay for bandwidth costs," he says. "It can make a really big impact on the economics of video-on-demand and delivering music over the Net."

Tough Competition

Microsoft's proprietary media format competes against those from RealNetworks and Apple Computer, as well as the MP3 file format, an open standard made popular through file swapping services such as Napster.

"This is one of the areas that's going through a lot of change. Microsoft is very serious about being a player," says Rob Enderle, an analyst with Giga Information Group. "They're in a clear race right now trying to establish themselves as the de facto standard for streaming media and delivering digital music content.

"We'll see how it turns out," he says.

Microsoft also announced on Tuesday that several makers of chips for DVD players have agreed to add support for the new Windows Media formats. Partners include Cirrus Logic, ESS Technology, LSI Logic, ST Microelectronics, and Zoran.

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