In case you missed the news, Microsoft just hit a major milestone on its road to shipping Windows 8 with the public launch of the Release Preview version. With this new version comes new features and as expected: a number of trivial, yet importing changes that will affect app developers and their apps.
Meanwhile, here at Vertigo we’ve been toiling day (and sometimes night) to help developers and clients prepare for this update so they can hit the ground running and create some of the first apps to ship on the new platform.
One such effort that we were proud to release alongside the launch of Windows 8 Release Preview is the update to the Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework (an open source video player component for Windows 8 metro style apps).
While Windows 8 includes some essential and great components to help building top notch media apps (namely the MediaElement for Xaml developers and the Video tag for JavaScript/HTML developers), the purpose of these components is primarily aimed at providing the fundamentals and low level support for playing audio and video. We here at Vertigo Software know video and we know that there is still a mountain to climb before you can ship a great media app. In a joint effort with Microsoft, we’ve worked hard to fill this gap by building a media player framework to make it simple and straightforward to accomplish the vast majority of your media app needs in Windows 8.
The Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework ships with a JavaScript and Xaml version of the framework that offers out of the box features to build great video apps without the fuss and months of development required to build your own media player. Besides support for the Windows 8 Release Preview, our latest update also includes support for major features such as player DVR controls (scrubbing, FF, RW, play/pause, …etc), player styling and branding, closed captioning, and just released today: video advertising!
Video advertising is very different from traditional banner advertising – which is already included with the Microsoft Advertising SDK. Video advertising allows you to seamlessly connect to video ad servers and stitch together commercials, overlays, and companion ads with your own content.
Advertising is an extremely important monetization strategy for many media companies and an equally significant undertaking to build from scratch. With the latest version of the player framework, you can simply add the new advertising plugin, schedule when ads should play and point your app at a VAST standards compliant ad server to play ads with your content. Ad scheduling, downloading, playback, and tracking is all handled for you by the player framework using IAB recommended standards such as VAST and VPAID.
Download everything you need today to start (or finish) your media app for Windows 8:
Microsoft Media Platform Player Framework
Enjoy!
Programmer Payback 