Creating a New Broadcast Publishing Point

After finishing the files, the Contoso producers copy them to the servers: the ASP pages go to the Web server, and the server-side playlist files are copied to the Windows Media server. The ASP pages are online as soon as they are copied and have been given time to propagate to a CDN’s remote or load-balancing servers, if necessary. The playlist files are also online and can be accessed directly. However, the playlists will broadcast from a publishing point.

The only way to create and configure a publishing point is with an administrator program that is connected to the servers, and server administration is usually reserved for server technicians who work for the CDN. Contoso has already worked out a process with the CDN for creating new publishing points. After copying the playlist files, the Contoso producer e-mails a request for a new broadcast publishing point to the CDN. The request contains the name of the source and wrapper playlists, and a proposed name for the publishing point.

The server technician creates the publishing point, adds the two playlist files, and sends a metafile back that the producer can use as a redirector for the publishing point. The name of the Contoso publishing point is InfoChannel, and the following is an example of a redirector metafile script for InfoChannel.asx:

<asx version = "3.0">     <title>Info Channel</title>     <entry>         <ref href = "mms://WMServer01/InfoChannel"/>     </entry> </asx>

The producer can copy the metafile to the Web server, and then add a link to it from a movie genre Web page. She could also rewrite the metafile, for example, to change the title and add more descriptive text. Notice that the metafile is a client-side script, so it is written using the Windows Media metafile programming reference instead of SMIL. However, even though the two use a different language and syntax, many of the display properties and attributes are the same. For example, title and author do the same things in both playlists.

Anything added to the metafile will override the same attributes in the server-side playlist. For example, you could intentionally override title text. You could even add more entry elements and create a client-side playlist. Then you would have a client-side playlist that has the info channel publishing point as one of its elements.