This spring we'll be launching a pilot program to offer turnkey advertising with the Silverlight Streaming video service.

At MIX'08 we announced this pilot program to test the turnkey integration of the Silverlight Streaming service with the Microsoft AdCenter platform. This pilot program will allow a control group of Silverlight Streaming account holders to take Silverlight videos and automatically insert contextual advertisements into the end-user video playback experience.

This is a real program, with revenues paid in US dollars, and it will include revenue sharing for the accounts participating in the trial.

The pilot program will work as follows:

• Potential participants can register their interest using the form at http://advertising.microsoft.com/publisher/sls, making sure to provide complete and accurate information.
• The pool of accounts will be reviewed by the biz dev team in early April and a number of accounts will be hand-picked for the first phase of the trial.
• A few weeks later, the selected account holders will receive an email inviting them to start uploading videos on http://Silverlight.live.com using the Silverlight Streaming video turnkey scenario that was introduced in the MIX'08 Beta release.
• For each video upload, it is essential that relevant and complete keywords are provided, and ads targeted for those keywords and optimized for the viewer will be displayed as part of the playback experience. As an account holder you will have the responsibility to showcase the video on your blog, web site, etc. For this reason, it is important that you provide a list of URLs where you plan to showcase or implement those videos.
• Throughout the spring and summer we will gradually scale up the number of participants in this program.

The terms and conditions are those which currently apply to Silverlight Streaming and AdCenter. This pilot program is only open to participants in the United States.