Two of the most common corporate uses of Windows Media Services
is for broadcasting executive speeches and company meetings. When
these corporate speeches and meetings are broadcast by using
Windows Media Services, employees that are located in other areas
do not have to travel or miss the speech, presenters can give the
speech at their convenience, and the meeting can be prerecorded
instead of live.
Using Windows Media Services, the corporations can choose to
broadcast the content as a live presentation or record it and
broadcast it later. In addition, the presentations can be made
available to viewers when they request it.
When implementing this scenario, consider the following:
Encoding software is optimized for live streaming or recording.
Choose the appropriate encoding software for the approach you want
to use. For example, Windows Media Encoder can encode a live stream
directly to your Windows Media server but it does not provide you
with the opportunity to edit the content. Alternatively, Microsoft
Producer for PowerPoint 2002 enables you to create and edit a
presentation from a live source and synchronize it with a set of
PowerPoint slides, but it cannot transmit a live stream. For more
information about content creation tools, see the Windows Media
home page at the Microsoft Web site.
Each client that connects to your server requires network
bandwidth. Determine whether it is best for all of your clients to
connect to the stream at the same time or whether it is be better
to schedule users to access the server at different times. Also
consider whether you want to deliver the broadcast using multicast
transmission to conserve network bandwidth.
You can use Windows Media Services to archive a broadcast
stream to a file. Once the stream has been archived, you can
rebroadcast the file or make it available for clients later by
using an on-demand publishing point.
