Our network leverages Microsoft's Windows Media Streaming and IIS Smooth Streaming for advanced media features such as pay-per-minute ("PPM") or digital rights management ("DRM"). Windows Media and IIS Media Services offer the most complete streaming media toolset available today for commercial media online, with interoperability across PCs, handhelds, mobile phones, and high-definition TVs.

QuickTime is a multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc. capable of delivering the most common formats of digital video, media clips, sound, text, animation, music, or even interactive panoramic images. Available for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems, it serves media to popular software such as iTunes, QuickTime Player, or the iPhone.

Our network also offers native Apple HTTP Adaptive Bitrate Streaming for iOS devices, including all of our paid media features such as deep link protection, pay-per-minute, and dynamic URL based scene selection.

Flash video offers a unique combination of simple media delivery with a flexible development environment for creating and delivering innovative, interactive media applications to a broad audience.

Just like YouTube and Google Video, the two most popular Flash video sites on the Internet, we provide Flash video hosting as a progressive download. In Oct '07, YouTube just added a feature we've always offered: the ability to seek ahead in the Flash files.

The two most common methods of delivering Flash videos are using embedded video within SWF files, in which the whole file must be downloaded before playback begins, or using progressive streaming of FLV files, in which the file can begin playing as soon as the player has enough video to get started. We also support streaming indexed .mp4 files.

If you need to go beyond the seekable Flash as used by YouTube, we offer industrial strength Flash streaming using Flash streaming servers and the Flash streaming protocol. The benefits include high performance for scaleable, true 24x7 live streaming (see Flash Live below), protection by anti-ripping technology and encrypted streaming for content protection, open options such as exclusive support for non-Flash live encoders and SHOUTcast re-streaming, and interactivity through two-way streaming audio, streaming video, shared object support and server side programming.

RealMedia was an early leading streaming format for the Internet. It is a multimedia container format created by RealNetworks. We support RealMedia (both video and audio) as a progressive download.

Our network allows users to download large files up to 6 GB in size from all our edge POPs. We focus on video, but we also do a great job delivering your software downloads, disk images, or archive files. Our core hubs support arbitrarily large files, so feel free to publish your Blu-ray disc images with us.

BitTorrent is a popular file sharing technology that speeds downloads for users willing to share in the overall transmission load on the network.

Instead of downloading an entire file, BitTorrent breaks a file into chunks and distributes them among several participating users. When you download a "torrent", you are also uploading it to another user. BitTorrent balances the load among many users since broadband download and upload speeds are not the same.

By making your media or large files available through BitTorrent from our network, you can offload some of the bandwidth and delivery costs to the community, while maintaining performance for extremely large audiences.

Your files are automatically spread across our datacenters in North America and Europe to be delivered to users from the datacenters that are closest to their geographical location. Depending on the "geographical" popularity of your files, they are automatically copied to the datacenters closest to geographical location of the users who choose this content more often.

When a user begins to play a video or download a file, our network determines which datacenter the user is closest to, based on the location of the user and the datacenter. By serving files from the closest place, users' streams are higher quality and downloads complete more quickly.

To handle world scale events, our MetaSwitch can also balance among multiple CDNs based on cost or peering preferences, or select—per viewer—among multiple URLs based on arbitrary viewer and content rules.

Your content is always stored in at least two different locations. Even if one of our "core" datacenters were to go offline, your content would be accessible to all users from another datacenter.

Your content is delivered from all datacenters based on popularity. Some CDNs charge extra for each additional datacenter, but we don't penalize you for being popular.

Our monitoring runs from a different datacenter and backbones than our VDN services, so we see the quality of service from end-users' perspective.

We include a Silverlight Player that supports standard Windows Media as well as VC1 or H.264 Smooth Streaming for the highest quality high definition playback across browsers.

We provide a high definition Flash Player that supports seekable playback, so the user can jump to any point in the video without having to wait for it to download.

Technically, there’s no such thing as HTML5 streaming video, but like users calls Smooth Streaming “Silverlight”, users use HTML5 video to mean anything that works in the HTML video tag across browsers. We provide a player that looks great across HTML5 capable browsers, and plays back H.264, Theora, and WebM encoded video depending on the browser. The player can “fall back” to the Silverlight and Flash players for older browsers.

We can automatically create the "metafiles" that are necessary to launch and play Windows Media, Quicktime, or Real videos in a user's media player. You don't have to learn a complicated file format, because a simple http:// link will both create the metafile and link to the media. We also create these dynamic playlists for complex media types such as IIS Smooth Streaming or Apple Adaptive HTTP.

To simplify adding videos to your blog, we can either create the link in your blog for you, or let you integrate the video yourself.

You can link to the video, you can embed the video, you can have a video blog-roll using an RSS feed, or CloudSat (our online portal for managing your account and content) can even submit the video to other social media sites.

Podcasting is an automatic mechanism whereby multimedia computer files are transferred from a server to a client, which pulls down XML files containing the Internet addresses of the media files. In general, these files contain audio or video, but also could be images, text, PDF, or any file type. Using the RSS 2.0 syndication format, podcasts are made available to subscribers just like news feeds. The client program captures the audio feeds and synchronizes them with the music player.

When you publish your podcasts into a directory on our network, we automatically generate the RSS feed for users to subscribe to, based on the metadata you've already put into your media file.

Or, if you want to host a "vodcast" (a podcast, but for video), that works too.

You can write searchable metadata (metatags or keywords) into your media files, to support features social community sites call folksonomy or tagging. By customer request, these keywords can be exposed to a search engine, giving a meaningful search engine view of your media, while linking to the media files directly.

Just like YouTube, we can auto-generate JPEG thumbnails from your uploaded video. We'll store these thumbnails along with your video file, and you can use them from your site.

We can help you customize Windows Media Player with your own look, even adding a featured link to your own media store.

A download application can tie your users to your media site and simplify how they get your media onto their computers. We also offer customized watermarking, downloading of tracks or albums, and similarly advanced downloading features.

We can customize a Silverlight, Flash, or HTML5 player to display videos with a look and feel developed exclusively for your project, giving you advanced features such as full screen mode, linking to similar videos, insert advertising, or even letting users mix their own video from clips.

Broadcasting a live event over the Internet has never been easier than with Advection.NET’s Live Streaming services. Through our CloudSat, you can provision events almost instantly. As a Windows Media Premier Certified Hosting Provider, we allow you to easily stream your events with a 24/7 support team proactively monitoring your live events.

We can help you offer pre-encoded streams that stream at a scheduled time, much like a live event except pre-recorded.

With Smooth Streaming, one of the world’s leading platforms for delivering content online, your audience gets a high-quality viewing experience. This technology is based on the adaptive bitrate mechanism that switches video quality in real time as available bandwidth shifts. You can encode your content at several quality levels (or we can do it per your request), typically with each level in its own complete file, using a compression tool such as Expression Encoder.

For broadcasting Flash live, we offer industrial strength Flash streaming using Flash streaming servers and the Flash streaming protocol. The benefits include high performance for scalable, true 24x7 live streaming, protection by anti-ripping technology and encrypted streaming for content protection, open options such as exclusive support for non-Flash live encoders and SHOUTcast re-streaming, and interactivity through two-way streaming audio, streaming video, shared object support and server side programming.

Although less common than Windows Media, QuickTime also supports live event streaming, and we support it across our network.

With our CloudSat you will able to manage your live events online, i.e. create, add, edit, and delete a live event at your convenience easily with just a few clicks.

The live events management FTP API allows your scheduling software to communicate with Advection.NET servers via FTP to create, update, and delete live events, simply by placing, updating, or removing simple text files with the event URLs.

Using a Pull connection is the most stable. It is recommended for anyone doing Live broadcasts lasting more than 3 hours, especially for people broadcasting 24/7. When using a Pull method, our servers are constantly looking for content coming from your encoder. To do this, your encoder should have a static IP address to connect to. With pull points you can configure live events on the fly yourself.

Though using a Push connection is less stable than Pull connection, it allows you to broadcast from any computer in the world with an encoder installed. It is recommended for people who are doing Live broadcasts from multiple locations, or people doing short broadcasts who cannot get a static IP address. Firewalls and router configuration are not necessary when using a Push, but you will need to work with our network operations center ("NOC") to set up the event.

These are unskippable video ads that play immediately before or after the video content that the user requested. We can work with you to configure a group of media files to show ads from your current video ad provider, or let you show ads from your own designated folder.

You may have content that you want to be sure a user plays in the order you specify, such as tracks on a music album, or parts of a speech. A server-side playlist identifies what content is played for a client, the time it is played, and the order it is played. In a simple configuration, a server-side playlist will loop through the media files in a certain folder, but based on your business requirements, we'll help with a solution suitable for you.

Users will not be able to "skip" the ad by fast forwarding, rewinding, or dragging the slide bar.

Your ads can be drawn from a third party provider, or ads against a certain directory can be played from a media directory you specify.

Unfortunately, most advertising on the web is text or images, not video. Our beta service lets you embed contextual image or text ads into a pre-roll or post-roll Windows Media ad. For more information about this service, contact sales.

When a user is playing long form content, ads can be inserted in the middle of the stream, not just as pre-roll or post-roll. We can also switch, server side, to alternate streams.

Bandwidth theft (sometimes referred to as deep-linking or hot-linking) is more and more common, thanks to the explosion of web browser toolbars to help users capture URLs that link to content they like. Users, bloggers, or professional content theft sites take your media links and embed them in their sites, letting you pay for the bandwidth while they show their own ads and keep the users on their own sites.

We can help prevent this type of bandwidth theft by supporting "deep link protection". DLP allows you to control the links so users can only play media by clicking on it from your own site.

This is a more advanced form of link protection that requires payment before a video is offered to a user, and reports back to your web site which users watched which videos.

The Advection.NET Pay-Per-Minute (PPM) technology for Windows Media allows restricting time for viewing your paid media content hosted on our network. The PPM technology is applicable to both on-demand and live content. Entertainment content may be suited to this model, which works much like pre-paid long distance phone cards or cell phone plans. The user purchases a batch of minutes, and then can use those minutes across your choice of video or audio in your library of content.

This service allows you to block users from watching or listening to content based on their geographical location. For example, if you have the rights to stream a sporting event to users in the US only, we let you "block" other users from other countries from watching this content.

We can connect your viewers to different streaming video sources based on viewer properties such as geography, ISP, player, or any other detectable attribute.

Our digital rights management configurations are extremely flexible, offering almost any business model you can imagine. DRM lets you decide who can play a file, under what conditions, for how long, etc. When a user tries to play a file, their player contacts us, and based on your business rules, we allow or disallow the play, i.e. an encrypted file cannot be played back without a license.

These DRM technologies are based around Microsoft's Plays-for-Sure, so your content has to be in Windows Media format and hosted on our network.

As you can see from the pricing below, we don't charge extra for DRM encryption, packaging, and licensing, it's already built into the costs of storage and bandwidth.

PlayReady is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) product from Microsoft for portable devices. It is oriented primarily to be platform independent: unlike other Microsoft DRM products, PlayReady can be ported to any kind of portable device, even if it uses non-Microsoft technology.

Silverlight 2.0, released in October 2008, is powered by a version of PlayReady. The PlayReady in Silverlight supports only connected playback with streaming or progressive-downloaded content, and has no capability to store licenses for offline or disconnected use. There is a nominal per license royalty cost, and a nominal cost for serving the licenses.

Video-on-demand companies like Netflix use Playready to protect movies, while software such as Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 and Windows 7 use PlayReady to protect premium TV content.

The DECE’s UltraViolet™ will use a Protected Interoperable File Format (PIFF), which we also support.

Once your content is uploaded to our network, we'll handle the DRM encryption, packaging, and licensing, automatically, so you don't have to mess with complicated control panels or programming. As you can see we do not charge additional fees for encryption.

Once a file is DRM protected, back end systems have to keep track of the licensing information, file identifiers, business rules, etc. If you replace or rename the original file, all this information must be kept track of as well. We handle these things for you automatically.

When your end-users click the link to DRM-protected content your website issues an encrypted cookie with the desired license schema ID for the required content. Then the Advection.NET license servers accept this cookie and issue a license based on the cookie data. Cookies can also allow resetting the license schema properties.

The license request from WMP is sent to your own servers running code that we provide you. Your servers authorize the user and send a license request to us that we fulfil. This gives your site the most flexibility to manage business rules and which end-users are authorized to view content. DRM with flexible business rules doesn't get any simpler than this.

If your web site doesn't support digital media sales and membership management, we can do the heavy lifting for you. We provide you with a rich and full featured API to create and manage users, and keep track of their media purchases, leveraging our financial grade database and transaction systems to save you from having to build and host your own.

License pre-delivery lets you serve a DRM license before a DRM-protected file is played. This way, a user, after acquiring a file, is not required to make additional steps to get a license. For example, a user selects a song and buys it, and a license is issued at the same time. Then they download the song and can play it right off the bat.

Silent mode supports license acquisition without the user being aware of the process, i.e. without displaying any windows. This is commonly used for time sensitive content that you want users to be able to play but have expire later, or even simply to track the usage or playback of media.

If a user attempts to play a DRM protected file, you can offer a wizard-like point of purchase or licensing information directly in the Windows Media Player's dialog boxes.

If you have affiliates and wish to receive information on the content usage by affiliates in your DRM invoice, you can use the Affiliate Tracking option. Tracking is performed on the Advection.NET side by the affiliate (merchant) ID that is inserted into the content header during DRM packaging.

At your request we can configure the system so that your affiliates use different DRM licensing modes.

With a combination of silent licensing and affiliate tracking, you can seed media onto P2P networks, and get a picture of the media's uptake.

Have a look at as an example. Our platform supports web stores that work in IE, Safari, and Firefox, a Windows Media Player embedded store that works inside the media player like iTunes store works in the iTunes player, and even supports a Windows Media Center Edition store for the 10 ft. set top box experience. If you are interested in DRM but also want to reach the widest audience, we can DRM protected files to most users, but automatically deliver watermarked files to Apple device owners. The platform also tracks artist and label rights, and rights-holder logins so they can manage their own catalogs. There's even a standalone branded download manager.

When a user is playing music or video in their media player, why not let them browse and buy content inside the same app? With our embedded media store, users can browse, sample, and purchase your music or video without leaving their media player software. Without leaving the player, your customers can fill a shopping cart with tracks or clips and download the entire batch in the background while playing other music or videos.

We based our Media Center Edition (MCE) store on a decade of home entertainment usability research. Browsing through albums or DVDs takes a couple clicks. Users can register through their TV, using a video game style keyboard with their remote. Following an MCE store purchase, the content can be streamed live, or downloaded in the background while the user watches something else, just like they can record one TV show while watching another.

Media Inventory Autoloader scans a directory structure and loads it into a media store complete with metadata like album title and track names.

Video Thumbnail Generator auto-generates JPEG thumbnails for your media store site from the uploaded videos. You can also use a web browser interface to scan through the video and choose the screenshot.

Media Store Affiliates can track additional brands selling the same content, and split revenue accordingly.

A branded media store uses the core platform features but lets you use your own logo and coloring.

A customized media store is built from your own "look and feel" templates, using the internal features of the platform to support the functionality. We can also add features unique to your business model, for a very modest development cost.

Easily convert digital video for streaming, downloads, set top boxes, or portable media players by subscribing to Advection.NET's high performance transcoding server farm. This is a fast and inexpensive path to supporting user generated content ("UGC") uploads or converting your own digital media for online delivery.

See Transcoding Plans for details and pricing.

Not sure your files will play on popular devices? We can check and analyze your video files' encoding compatibility. At your request, our encoding team will produce a detailed report on which files may be incompatible and which files must be re-encoded for better quality.

Browse your content, check linking and embedding URLs, see your recent stats, manage users and contact info, and more, with Advection.NET's CloudSat.

With CloudSat you can manage your sub-accounts online at your convenience: adding new sub-accounts, editing the existing ones and tracking the sub-accounts' usage is simple and fast.

Using our VDN APIs, you can manage video delivery network ("VDN") sub-accounts from your own control panel software.

Your CloudSat home page provides links to different types of statistics giving you an idea of what and how much you are delivering.

Media Usage Analysis Reports include weekly and monthly updates. These reports highlight the popularity of different files, indicate areas of your site that cause errors and require checking, illustrate the amount of traffic generated by visitors to your site, etc.

To simplify media management, Advection.NET allows you to organize and administer your media using standard FTP software built into Windows XP or Mac OS X, or your preferred commercial FTP client software.

Rsync uses a quick and reliable algorithm to very quickly bring remote and host files into sync. Rsync is fast because it just sends the differences in the files over the network instead of sending the complete files.

We also provide the full actual "raw logs" collected hourly from the global datacenters. Analyzing raw logs can provide you a more detailed look at site accesses than the media reports, by allowing you to import the logs into any reporting tool of your choice.

For resellers with sub-accounts, we give you your master logs, and also create raw logs for each sub-account that show only their own data.

Subscribe to our RSS service alerts from your CloudSat home page to receive timely details about network maintenance or other important updates.

In addition to the web based CloudSat, Advection.NET provides you with an advanced way for managing your accounts on our network, viewing your media usage statistics, and creating live events: the Advection.NET VDN API. Our web services replicate and extend the capabilities of the CloudSat, enabling you to use them directly from your own content management system or control panel software.

With "Full Access", you can access usage data, manage content, and manage sub-accounts.

We use a "ticketing" system to keep track and communicate with our clients. This ensures all requests are tracked and recorded, with a complete history by incident and by client. You don't have to learn any new technology to use it, just send us a support request by email and the ticket will be created and tracked for you automatically.

If you want to check on open tickets or review ticket histories, you may log into the ticket interface through the web.

At the end of each billing cycle, you'll receive a detailed breakdown of any incidents or support costs by ticket.

Our engineers are here 24 hours a day, including weekends and holidays, to assist you with your requests. Our developers' office day starts earlier than it does in the USA, so if you ask for an update, new feature, or fix, it will often be waiting for you when you come in the next day. Our support tickets are managed by our real network engineers and developers, not outsourced to people reading scripts who may not really be able to resolve your problem.

Need help integrating your site with Advection.NET's services? We provide an appropriate number of hours to help you get your service of the ground, and additional hours are inexpensive.

If it turns out an issue is on our end, you will not be billed for the support incident.

Streaming media is still an emerging technology, and it's hard to find the qualified expertise you may need to run the digital media parts of your business. Based on your plan, you can leverage our expert's time to help you with streaming media related technical issues.

The cost for additional hours of technical assistance is based on the plan you have selected. Our technical staff will consult and assist you with any technical issues and requests you may have.

If your users are well supported, it helps you grow your business and us ours. We can help provide support to your end-users at a rate based on the plan you have selected.

We can provide additional end-user support based on the plan you have selected.

We do understand the importance of your business to be "online" 24/7. Our Media plan clients and higher can "escalate" their requests in an emergency case and the appropriate management and development team will be called into office.

We do understand the importance of your business to be "online" 24/7. Our Media plan clients and higher can "escalate" their requests in an emergency case and the appropriate management and development team will be called into office.