IIS Media Pack – Bit Rate Throttling

June 6, 2009 by Butterfly Filed under: Web Hosting

Media on Web Sites.

These days almost every website worth it’s salt contains media rich content. Especially businesses which need to ‘wow’ consumers with a variety of strategies. The website being the figurehead of the company needs to present a truly compelling experience.

Unfortunately, this comes at a cost. Media, like high resolution pictures (say for an architectural firm), or videos of presentations are always large files and delivering this content to a customer in a manner that is cost effective, and at the same time compelling is a challenge to web masters everywhere.

The main reason for this is that bandwidth is expensive and firms have to realize that not everyone might want to watch a 10 minute video on the company’s achievements. However, there are people who will want to watch it, and these important stakeholders must be catered to.

Bit Rate Throttling with the IIS Media pack

IIS 7 has been specially built with media rich content in mind. It’s latest features present an admirable slew of technologies that help deliver streaming content to the viewer in a manner that can really save bandwidth.

Bit rate throttling is one such technology. What it essentially means is that the IIS application sends across enough video very quickly to the user for him or her to watch for a short period of time. If the user continues to show interest, well and good. Otherwise, it will stop the streaming in case the user moves to another page.

Let us take an example. Suppose I have a 50 MB video encoded at a rate of 450 kbps – That’s 450 kilobits per second. The IIS Media Pack (which is an add on to IIS 7), detecting this bit rate, will quickly send across say 20 seconds of content to the user. This means 450/8*20 = 1125 KB or just about 1.1 MB. After that, it will keep sending the standard rate of the video at just 450 kbps. Therefore, the user always has 20 seconds of video to watch so that his viewing experience will not be interrupted and the server sends no more than the standard bit rate of the file.

Now suppose the viewer watches for 30 seconds and leaves. The total amount that IIS would have sent over to the user would be 30 seconds + 20 seconds of video which is equal to just 2.73 MB. Compared to the total size of the video which is 50 MB, this is a massive cost saving caused due to the intelligent handling of media by the IIS Media Pack.

Cost Savings.

Imagine now that you have a thousand visitors to your site every day. Without the IIS Media Pack, you would incur huge costs due to the bandwidth that is used to stream out the media file. With the IIS Media Pack in place, you incur only a fraction of the costs – in essence, you pay only for what was watched!

In this manner, you are able to efficiently target users who are genuinely interested in the specific videos that are on the screen. It also allows you to configure the settings for individual connections. The number of media formats supported by this is very large and this is a free add on to any IIS configuration! Another great release from the IIS team!