The Global Conference Is Real:

The Success of the PDC10

Player and Application
White Paper

February 2011
Contents
The Limits of Traditional Conferencing....................................................................... 3

New Vision, New Technology ....................................................................................... 3

The Conference Player and Application ...................................................................... 4

High-Definition Live Streaming Video—Broadcast Quality ....................................................................... 5
Features for Global Audiences .................................................................................................................. 6
Integrating Social Media ............................................................................................................................ 7
Dynamic Navigation................................................................................................................................... 8
Health Monitoring .................................................................................................................................... 10
Windows Phone 7 Application ................................................................................................................. 10

Content Management System .................................................................................... 11

Processing Multiple High-Definition Video Feeds .................................................... 12

Content Delivery Networks ......................................................................................... 13

Results ......................................................................................................................... 13

To Learn More ............................................................................................................. 14

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 2
The Limits of Traditional Conferencing
Just about everything that used to be done in person—such as buying consumer goods or industrial
supplies, chatting with friends or collaborating with colleagues, watching movies or training for a new
job—seems to happen increasingly online. But there are exceptions.

Business and industry events and conferences are still largely, if not entirely, onsite affairs. True,
―conferencing‖ is a standard component of business technology, but such conferencing is mostly confined
to bringing together a limited number of people, at a limited number of endpoints, for peer-to-peer audio,
video, and web content. Also, some ―virtual conferencing‖ solutions put organizers and attendees into the
equivalent of a virtual world, forcing them to deal with distractions from the purpose of their online
gathering. Today’s conferencing solutions aren’t designed to support the thousands of people who attend
large-scale business conferences. They don’t provide the interactivity that is a hallmark of such meetings.
They can’t juggle the simultaneous sessions that comprise these conferences. And they certainly can’t do
all of this at the same time, in real time, for conference participants located anywhere around the world.

So, when Microsoft needed a conferencing solution, it set out to build one that overcame these
limitations.

Microsoft had several motivations for its move into unprecedented, large-scale virtual conferencing. First,
it wanted to multiply the impact of its Professional Developer Conference (PDC). The PDC is the
company’s periodic opportunity to demonstrate and evangelize Microsoft platforms and technologies that
help developers to be successful building their own solutions. That event typically was attended by 5,000
to 7,000 developers, mostly from the United States, with significant representation from around the world.

Perhaps tens or scores of thousands of others would have liked to attend, but were prevented by the
increasing costs of travel and lodging, particularly in a difficult economy, and by the limit that Microsoft
had to put on attendance. The conference was typically held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, to
accommodate the several thousand attendees. But that also limited the participation of Microsoft
speakers, who had to make the time to travel to Los Angeles and back, and it limited the interaction of
attendees with Microsoft personnel.

New Vision, New Technology

For PDC10, the PDC held at the end of October 2010, Microsoft decided to address these concerns, and
more, by taking the conference onto the Internet. An onsite conference would still be held, limited to 1,000
attendees and conducted on the Microsoft campus. But this would be secondary to the online conference,
which would be the focus of Microsoft activity. A virtual conference would immediately lift the limit on
attendees, allowing any developer anywhere to attend, merely for the price of an Internet connection.

But it would do more. Beyond providing traditional ―talking heads‖ and linear video that would replicate a
traditional conference experience, Microsoft wanted the virtual conference to enrich and surpass that
experience with capabilities that only an online version might offer, capabilities that Microsoft believed
had not been offered previously. The company’s goal was to raise the bar for online conferences beyond
anything that people had seen on the web before. Some of the ways in which Microsoft hoped to achieve
this were the following:

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 3
  High-quality integration of multiple high-definition video streams, content streams, and parallel
video tracks
 Multiple simultaneous audio translations from English into French, Spanish, Japanese, and
Chinese, plus live closed-captioning in English
 Unprecedented online interaction via an integrated Twitter client, live global question and answer,
real-time polling, and dynamic scheduling

The global conferencing solution that Microsoft envisioned would also differ from traditional solutions in
subtle ways. Traditional conferencing solutions generally require participants to be authenticated. The
virtual PDC solution, in contrast, would enable anyone, anywhere to access conference content
anonymously, and to interact with that content in real time. Presenters would be able to modify their
presentations—again, in real time—based on direct, global feedback during their sessions. They could
answer far more questions from the global audience than could ever have been answered before. And
attendees would be able to share video content and chat with other attendees, in ways that reflect
traditional conference conversations.

Beyond addressing the needs of PDC attendees, the online conference solution would also demonstrate
the viability, and desirability, of using Microsoft technologies for a level of communication, education, and
interaction that had never, as near as company executives could tell, been attempted before.

Technology, until recently, had been insufficient to realize this vision. Within the last few years, that’s
changed, with the introduction and maturity of the Microsoft Silverlight 4 platform and Silverlight Media
Framework 2, Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services with Smooth Streaming, and the
Windows Azure cloud-computing platform and its Windows Azure content delivery network (CDN).

Was Microsoft prepared for the sheer global scope and scalability required for the envisioned solution?
Microsoft had powered NBC Sunday Night Football (NFL Experience), the 2008 Summer Olympics and
2010 Winter Olympics, March Madness 2009 and 2011, and the 2010 Wimbledon tournament on the
web. Microsoft executives believed they were ready for PDC10.

And they were right. The multifaceted solution that eventually achieved all of these aims consisted of the
following:

 A sophisticated, interactive video player and conference application

 Multiple high-definition video feeds managed from a network operations center
 Multiple content delivery networks to give the conference global reach

This white paper describes these components and how they worked together to realize the
unprecedented vision of a rich, live, large-scale online conference. The potential applications of this
solution to global needs other than annual Microsoft PDC conferences should be apparent to all major
corporations and organizations.

The Conference Player and Application

The core of the PDC10 virtual conference solution was the conference player and application, which
served all the conference content (speakers’ audio and video, slide decks and demonstrations, audio
translations and closed captioning, schedule information, and video on demand) and interactive features
(polling, question and answer, in-conference tweeting), and provided a variety of ways to navigate
through, view, and share content. The player and application, as well as an application for Windows

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 4
Phone 7, was designed and built for Microsoft by Vertigo, an award-winning design and development
firm.

High-Definition Live Streaming Video—Broadcast Quality

The onsite PDC10 event included both keynote addresses and a series of four simultaneous breakout
sessions. The player and application had to support all of these sessions, and do so at broadcast quality.
High-quality video was particularly important given the frequent presentation of code demonstrations; if
the code displayed on screens in the onsite session rooms wasn’t legible to online attendees, then the
online experiment could not be deemed a success.

The PDC10 application met these requirements with a player that supported live high-definition streaming
of two video feeds, or camera angles, per session (one each for the speaker and the
slides/demonstrations) with digital video recorder (DVR) capability. The slides/demonstrations video
showed what onsite participants saw projected from the presenter’s computer. The presenter’s video
remained on the presenter throughout the presentation. One of the video feeds took up a large, central
space on the player ―real estate,‖ the other played in a smaller screen to the side of the player (see figure
1). Online attendees could swap these two video feeds between the two player windows at any time,
based on which video feeds they wanted to see in detail.

Figure 1. This view of the PDC10 application shows the presenter’s slide deck displayed in the main video window, with
the presenter displayed in the smaller window to the right. The viewer could swap these feeds at any time.

The high-definition video feeds were enabled by IIS Media Services Smooth Streaming technology and
the video players were based on Silverlight 4 and the Silverlight Media Framework 2. These technologies

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 5
support multiple bit-rate streams so viewers could receive and watch video content despite the varying
bandwidths of their Internet connections. As available bandwidth increased, the video automatically
stepped up to higher resolutions while the frame rate remained the same (see figure 2).

Video Bit-Rate Width Height Frame Rate Notes

(Kbps)
2950 1280 720 29.97
1950 960 540 29.97
1300 704 400 29.97 Main Player size
850 512 288 29.97
550 400 224 29.97
350 320 176 29.97 PiP size
Audio: WMA Pro - 48 Kbps - 48 kHz – stereo

Figure 2. The PDC player’s multiple bit-rate capacity supported a range of video profiles that maintained frame rates while
displaying optimal video resolutions. The audio reference is to Windows Media Audio Professional.

The use of these Microsoft technologies also eliminated the traditional need to buffer the downloading
video before it could be played. This was essential to maintaining the live quality of the event, and to
providing synchronization among viewers and presenters. Synchronization of the two feeds or camera
angles of any given session was also facilitated by encoding them into a single stream together with their
metadata, as opposed to the traditional method of encoding the feeds into separate streams. Question
and answer, polls, and other interactive features were possible because of this synchronization—every
viewer and presenter saw the same video at the same time, regardless of when viewers switched into the
live presentations.

The use of full high-definition 1280 x 720 video at a bit-rate of 2950 Kbps appears to be a first in live
Internet video conferencing. It was unquestionably a major contributor to the quality that Microsoft sought,
and to meeting the goal of making the online event meet and exceed a traditional onsite event.

The DVR capability, also based on Silverlight technology, made it possible for viewers to ―seek‖ to any
point on the presentation’s timeline, to jump back 15 seconds to repeat a point just made by the
presenter, and to rewind or fast forward while watching the video content.

Features for Global Audiences

To make the entire PDC10 accessible to global audiences—and to give those audiences an online
experience superior to the onsite experience—Microsoft and Vertigo also planned for two additional
features: simultaneous translations and closed-captioning. The conference was translated into Chinese,
French, Japanese, and Spanish, which, along with the English in which the conference was presented,
made a total of five available languages. With every session translated live, and with four breakout tracks
running concurrently, that resulted in a total of 16 simultaneous translations, which were embedded into
the live video streams. Viewers could switch from session to session and immediately see the session
and hear it in the language of their choice, without any gaps or delays. Microsoft believes this is the first
time that multiple simultaneous translations have been possible for an online event of this type.

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 6
Closed-captioning further expanded the reach of the conference to international viewers who might read
but not speak English, as well as to people with hearing disabilities and those viewing the conference in
settings in which playing the audio was inappropriate.

Integrating Social Media

The traditional value of conferences comes only partially from the speakers and their presentations.
Another key to their value comes from the interactions—typically informal and ad hoc—among attendees.
An online conferencing solution needs a way to replicate this attendee interactivity. Some solutions
attempt to meet this challenge with an avatar-based environment. But people—especially in a business or
professional context—seldom use avatars for networking and interacting with colleagues. Instead, they
use social and professional networking sites. Microsoft and Vertigo took their cue from such sites in
building attendee interactivity into the PDC10 application. They planned and implemented a range of
interactive and social media features in the solution, including live question and answer, live polling, and
an inline Twitter client (see figure 3). They also included the deep linking of content.

Figure 3. The PDC10 application included embedded functionality for live question and answer, polling, and Twitter feeds.

Live question and answer. At traditional conferences with an online component, onsite attendees can
ask questions; online attendees often can’t. To give online attendees at PDC10 the optimum ability to
interact with Microsoft product teams and have their questions answered, Microsoft and Vertigo
embedded a live question and answer tool in the application, supported by the Windows Azure platform
for cloud computing to ensure scalability. To handle the anticipated volume of questions, Microsoft
proctors were available in each session to respond to questions without interrupting the flow of the
speaker’s presentation. Sessions received and responded to up to 50 questions each—a number far
higher than could be handled in a traditional, onsite session.

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 7
Live Polling. Live polling functioned similarly, but was initiated by the presenters. Because the polling
results were received live by the presenters, those presenters were able to use them to adjust their
content while the sessions were still underway, in order to better meet the expectations, needs, and
interests of attendees. Online and onsite attendees participated on an equal basis in this polling.
Windows Azure similarly supported the scalability required for global polling.

Twitter. To bring the interactivity of social networking sites to PDC10, Microsoft and Vertigo made use of
an existing site—Twitter—by designing an inline Twitter client for their application. The use of a Twitter
client gave attendees an informal, familiar, and easy-to-use way to hold conversations with each other.
They gave a distinct hash tag to each session, so that online attendees in any given session could
exchange comments with each other about it. And, unlike attendees at an onsite conference, the PDC10
online attendees could exchange their comments, thoughts, and insights in real time while the session
was underway, without disturbing the presenter or other attendees. The conference received more than
13,000 Tweets.

The inline Twitter client served another function, as well. Because the Twitter comments were visible to
followers of the online participants, those comments served as a promotional tool for PDC10. Developers
and others who perhaps otherwise didn’t know about PDC10 learned about it from their Twitter feeds in a
highly viral, and thus persuasive, way. Many of them went to the conference site to learn more, and
stayed for one or more sessions—adding to the attendance totals.

Deep Linking. Online attendees also used the PDC10 application to share conference video with
colleagues and others. That’s been done before—but perhaps not with the specificity made possible by
the PDC10 application and its underlying Smooth Streaming technology. Attendees could use Twitter or
email to direct others not only to particular videos, but to exact moments within that video. Recipients of
these deep links were able to go directly to the specified segments, without having to wait, for example,
for hour-long videos to download.

Dynamic Navigation
With keynote sessions, concurrent breakout sessions, and video on demand content, it could have been
easy for a visitor to the PDC10 application to become overwhelmed by the choices. It was essential to
give visitors the information they wanted to make optimal viewing choices and to help them to implement
those choices. The PDC10 application did this in at least two key ways: By making it possible for viewers
to take advantage of the session evaluations of the conference audience and by creating a dynamic
schedule component.

Shared Ratings. Another innovative form of interactivity in the PDC10 application—shared ratings—is
actually a two-pronged feature that also helped attendees to choose which sessions to attend. First, the
application solicited attendees’ input on their satisfaction with, and the perceived value of, the sessions
they attended. Then, the application aggregated that feedback and redirected it in real time to online
attendees, so they could use the audience’s opinions and preferences to guide their choice of sessions to
view. Attendees viewed the results on a PDC Now page, part of the landing environment for the
application (see figure 4).

Viewers could see which current sessions were most popular, which sessions were most watched, most
liked, most satisfying, and most valuable. The audience’s feedback was also used to help determine
which sessions and editorial features to highlight on the home page of the application. Attendees could
explore the ratings while continuing to view a chosen session in a small window on the PDC Now page.

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 8
Figure 4. Visitors to the PDC10 application gained the benefit of the audience’s evaluations of current and past sessions.

As with the other interactivity features, the scalability required for shared ratings was supported by
Windows Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure supplied the database to receive and aggregate ratings, and
Windows Azure services pulled the aggregated data into the PDC10 application for display.

Guide. Another navigation feature available from the home page of the application was the Guide. As
might be anticipated, the Guide made it possible for attendees to navigate through session content by
schedule, session, or speaker (see figure 5). As with the PDC Now page, the Guide also enabled
attendees to view a minimized session video while exploring session information.

Figure 5. The PDC10 application included a dynamic, interactive guide to conference sessions.

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 9
The information in the Guide was part of the same content management system as the session feeds and
was integrated into the same encoding infrastructure used for those feeds. This provided an innovative
solution to a traditional challenge of online conference events: How to track dynamic changes to the
schedule. Conference schedules can change in many ways and often at the last minute: new presenters
are included to substitute for unavailable colleagues; scheduled rooms are changed to accommodate
onsite attendees or technology requirements; session titles are changed or corrected; sessions run short
or long, and so on. Traditionally, this metadata has been maintained in a separate database; it could be
difficult and time consuming to get this information updated in the database, and then to get the new
information to repopulate a website.

Instead, the PDC10 application turned the process of updating schedule information into a self-service
workflow. Authorized users—generally presenters and conference personnel—could update conference
information on a single website, from which the information flowed to all conference personnel who
needed it. And because the information was integrated into the audio and video encoding infrastructure, it
was also pushed out to all online attendees through the PDC10 application.

Health Monitoring
Ultimately, Microsoft wanted to evaluate the success of PDC10 not by merely holding the conference, but
by measuring the results of that conference: how many people attended online, how long they attended,
the extent to which translations and closed-captions were used, and how well the system performed—37
measures in all. To track these measures, the PDC10 application included a workflow mechanism that
gathered and aggregated this information from the players—powered by SQL Server StreamInsight. The
results appeared on a dashboard on the screens of Microsoft personnel who were monitoring system
health from the conference control room.

Getting this information in real time enabled conference personnel to address issues of video quality or
distribution as they occurred, so that an optimal online experience could be maintained. For example, in
an instance in which an encoding error was introduced into a video session, personnel could pinpoint the
exact location of the error, know how many viewers were affected by it, and fix the problem as soon as
possible. Conference personnel also used the system to work with the content delivery network partners
to resolve transient, local issues more quickly than had been possible before.

Windows Phone 7 Application

To help achieve the company’s goal for maximum online access to the
conference, Microsoft and Vertigo also created a PDC10 application for
Windows Phone 7. The application was of benefit to both remote attendees
and those onsite—who could attend one session in person while monitoring
another. Phone-based attendees had many of the same features available to
them as did consumers of the web-based application, including toggling
between camera angles on the speaker and on the slide decks or code
samples.

Microsoft believes this to be the first instance of live smooth-streaming of

video on Windows Phone 7. The mobile application included a video player
for Smooth Streaming based on the same player developed for the full
PDC10 application, and on Silverlight Media Framework 2.2 for Windows
Phone 7. Vertigo and Microsoft created phone-specific transmission profiles

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 10
and redefined bit-rates to suit the capabilities—such as limited screen space—of a mobile device. In all,
the applications’ developers estimate that they saved 80 percent of the time they would otherwise have
spent to create a mobile application—time that enabled them to meet the deadline for both applications,
and to do so cost effectively.

Content Management System

With the PDC10 player and application providing a way for attendees to interact with conference content,
Microsoft next needed a system that it could use to manage and publish that content. A key challenge
here was the requirement to control the complex combination of content—including the simultaneous
breakouts, keynotes, translations, closed-captioning, and video-on-demand content—and to do so in real
time.
To accomplish this, Microsoft worked with Southworks to create and operate a content management
system (CMS). They used this CMS to manage all the content, both live and on demand, as well as its
metadata and related assets, such as presenters’ biographies, presentations, and links to related
information.
Pre-recorded sessions were encoded to the target platforms—the PDC10 web-based player and mobile
application—using the IIS Transformation Manager. The metadata was then imported into the CMS so
that it too could be published to the target platforms.
All the live sessions were configured as assets within the CMS. A Silverlight control, Live Event Manager,
was used together with iStreamPlanet video automation, to schedule live events to be streamed live and
recorded for subsequent on-demand playback. Operators viewed current and upcoming live sessions
within the CMS. They used web service interfaces to both the video encoders and IIS Media Services
publishing points in order to initiate and terminate the session broadcasts.
Microsoft and Southworks used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as the foundation for the CMS. Several
built-in features of SharePoint Server provided key CMS functionality. SharePoint lists and templates
were used to organize the content and metadata. SharePoint Server also provided mechanisms for the
authentication and authorization to access content, and workflows to control the approvals and publishing
of content to the players. The SharePoint site also hosted the live dashboard that Microsoft and
Southworks used to monitor attendance levels, system performance, and other measures.
Microsoft and Southworks used Rough Cut Editor, a Silverlight control, to edit Smooth Streaming video
content from several files, and publish the result as a single video asset. The Rough Cut Editor was used
to splice content from breakout sessions into prerecorded Channel 9 broadcasts, and publish the result
as new assets. Because the Rough Cut Editor eliminated the traditional need to re-encode new assets, it
expedited publishing, so that new content could be made available to online attendees more quickly. The
Rough Cut Editor also represented a significant cost savings over the traditional editing process, which
typically required an Avid or similar editing system. While an AVID system can cost thousands of dollars,
Microsoft makes the Rough Cut Editor available to developers without charge through the CodePlex
website. Microsoft has also put the broader CMS system on CodePlex for developers to use without
charge.
The conference schedule was maintained in an XML document, which was continually updated in real
time. For example, as soon as CMS personnel initiated the video stream for a new live session, the
availability of that session was immediately entered into the XML document, which was pushed out to all
copies of the PDC10 player and application. The application then used the XML document to update the
schedule that it displayed to users, highlighting the new session as it became available. The same

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 11
process was used to indicate the completion of sessions as the CMS personnel ended their
transmissions.

Processing Multiple High-Definition Video Feeds

Complementing the PDC10 player and application were, as noted above, the multiple high-definition
video streams that the player displayed, and the infrastructure used to carry and process those streams
from the conference site to online attendees located around the world. The encoding, hosting, and
delivery of the live and on-demand video were implemented by iStreamPlanet and Microsoft Studios, the
company’s internal business unit for audio, video, and web production.

The conference event took place at the on-campus Microsoft Convention Center in Redmond,
Washington. There, nine simultaneous and redundant high-definition broadcast-quality feeds were
transmitted across campus over fiber to Microsoft Studios. The feeds consisted of the keynote and the
four concurrent breakout sessions, plus four redundant breakout session feeds. Each feed included the
dual camera angles on the speaker and the slides and demonstrations.

At Microsoft Studios, 16 translation booths were built inside two large sound stages to handle the real-
time translation of each session into French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. The audio translation
tracks, as well as English closed-captions, were then embedded into the event feeds and transmitted
from Microsoft to iStreamPlanet over redundant fiber networks. From there, the content was delivered as
Silverlight smooth streams to the content delivery networks (see figure 7).

Microsoft Studios

Translations Webcast and Network

Operations Control Center
Session One

Conference Site/ Encoding

Microsoft Campus Center

Session Two
Internet Content
Delivery Networks:

Windows Azure
Session Three
iStreamPlanet Akamai
ChinaCache

Session Four

Channel 9

English
Captions

Figure 7. Processing the video feeds required encoding four live translations and one closed-caption set per stream.

The Microsoft Studios on-campus facility served as the conference’s network operations center. From
within that location, the virtual event team monitored and managed the online conference, including
communications to all relevant parties inside and outside of Microsoft. In addition to the live video,

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 12
Microsoft encoded 35 pre-recorded sessions with which to pre-populate the website. These sessions
mirrored the live sessions in format and content. They gave visitors to the site content to review prior to
the start of the live conference, as well as alternative content to view while the live sessions were in
progress.

In addition to being highly effective, this solution was highly cost-effective. Because a single set of
encoders was used for the desktop and mobile environments, the developers of the PDC10 application
saved the time and trouble of purchasing, learning, and operating dual encoders. The Microsoft
Expression Encoder used to create the video-on-demand experience provided more functionality than
other tools on the market at just 10 percent of the cost.

Content Delivery Networks

Another aspect of the solution that was crucial to delivering high-quality video in real time to online
attendees throughout the world was the content delivery networks used by Microsoft. The PDC10 solution
used the Windows Azure content delivery network, as well as delivery networks from ChinaCache and
Akamai.

The Windows Azure CDN, with nodes throughout the world, helped to ensure that online attendees
downloaded video from a nearby source regardless of where they were—so that video would be
transmitted with the lowest possible latency and the highest possible quality. In addition to hosting video-
on-demand content, Windows Azure CDN also hosted the PDC10 player and application software that
online attendees downloaded to view content and interact with the conference.

Redundant servers were hosted at every point in the network to maximize reliability, and several pairs of
servers were established in high-demand areas to give online attendees maximum availability to video
content. The entire network was tested repeatedly each day to track performance, with the results
monitored through the solution dashboard mentioned earlier.

Live video content was distributed by Akamai. The use of ChinaCache as a supplemental CDN put
content closer to online attendees in China than would have been possible with servers based elsewhere
in Asia. The result was faster, higher-quality video for Chinese attendees.

Results
Microsoft wanted PDC10 to be the best-attended developer conference in its history, with attendees
representing a truly global developer community. It wanted to deliver an immersive and engaging online
experience that met and exceeded the onsite experience. And it wanted to accomplish this with current
Microsoft technology, demonstrating the capabilities of that technology to deliver highly innovative and
even unprecedented solutions, and to do so cost effectively.

Microsoft accomplished all of these aims with the PDC10 player and application.

In contrast to the 5,000 to 7,000 attendees of the traditional Microsoft developer conference, PDC10
attracted more than 100,000 developers and 300,000 individual video views during its two-day span—50
percent higher than the company’s goal for the conference. Throughout the month of November 2010,
viewers requested archived and on-demand content more than 338 million times.

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 13
The reach of PDC10 was decidedly global. The site was visited by audiences from more than 150
countries over the two-day conference period. About 10 percent of the online audience used the
simultaneous-translation feature, further demonstrating the success of the solution in extending the
PDC’s reach to non-native English speakers.

The success of the online solution in meeting and exceeding the onsite experience can be measured in
several ways. Online attendees had little or no wait for conference content, with the solution supporting
more than 5,000 concurrent connections with an average response time to requests of less than one-
tenth of a second (0.07 seconds).

Attendees responded positively to this tremendous availability and reliability. They viewed more than
500,000 hours of conference content. The average video satisfaction rating for PDC content was 3.75 out
of 4 (where 4 was ―very satisfied‖), and the average value rating was 3.9 out of 5 (where 5 was extremely
valuable). No session achieved an average satisfaction or value rating below 3.

The PDC10 experience was an unprecedented showcase for reaching a global audience—and for
demonstrating the utility and cost-effectiveness of doing so through Microsoft technologies.

To Learn More
Visit the PDC10 conference site at: player.microsoftpdc.com

Download the Content Management System at: www.codeplex.com.

Download the Silverlight Media Framework at: smf.codeplex.com

Download the Silverlight Rough Cut Editor at: code.msdn.microsoft.com/RCE

Learn about Windows Azure at: www.microsoft.com/windowsazure

Visit the Microsoft partners for the PDC10 player and application at:

Akamai

ChinaCache

Dynamic Language

Inlet

iStreamPlanet

Vertigo

The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 14
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The Global Conference Is Real: The Success of the PDC10 Player and Application 15