Silverlight to Stream the Next Olympics Fully in HD

It looks like by any measure Silverlight (Silverlight 3 Beta now available) has become a 'mascot' of the Olympic Games. Last year, NBC used Microsoft's alternative to Adobe Flash to take the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing online. Come next year, Silverlight has already qualified to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. At MIX09, Microsoft and NBC announced a renewal of the 2008 partnership designed to offer users online video content of NBC's 2010 Olympics coverage. Perkins Miller, NBC senior vice president, revealed that the 2010 Olympics would be delivered fully in HD via Silverlight.

“This is going to be an adaptive, Smooth Streaming event, full 720p,” Miller stated. “So, when you walk out of your house in the morning, and you go to your office, and you've left your beautiful 52-inch HD television at home, and you sit down at your desk and you want to grab some video from the Olympics that day, it's going to mirror that experience. We're going to be able to deliver you that continuous, high quality experience that you expect now as a consumer.”

However, the user experience will be evolved compared to the 2008 coverage of the Beijing Olympics. This because viewers will not only be able to watch content in HD, with adaptive smooth streaming delivered at 720p, but also pause, rewind, view in super slow motion, perform high resolution frame capture, take advantage of metadata overlays, and real-time video alerts and feeds, all live.

“Last summer, NBC hosted the largest sporting event ever held on the web, and they chose Silverlight to do this. Perkins Miller, SVP/GM Digital Media at NBC Sports is on-stage to talk about the background. A cacophony of statistics: 1.3 billion page views, 52.1 unique visitors, 75.5 million videos watched, 9.9 million hours of video consumed, 27 minutes of viewing per session, 5,000 unique clips viewed per day during the final week, 35 million mobile views, 130,000 peak streams, 3.4 petabytes of video delivered,” explained Tim Sneath, client platform evangelist.


Silverlight 3 Beta 3 is available for download here.