14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft, MSN and NBC are gearing up for what the Redmond company referred to as a groundbreaking online Olympics viewing experience, nothing short of the most widely watched Olympic event via the Internet. And Silverlight 2 will be placed firmly at the heart of the sporting competition, courtesy of the NBCOlympics.com on MSN website. According to Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, the online hotspot will be the largest Silverlight application built since the software giant released its alternative to Adobe Flash.
"NBCOlympics.com on MSN will give sports fans an Olympics experience online like never before, allowing them to watch what they want, when they want. At its peak, NBCOlympics.com will broadcast 20 simultaneous streams online in the richest video format available on the Web today. To put this into perspective, if you made watching the 2008 Summer Olympics a full-time job, it would take you more than two and a half years to watch all the content," stated Perkins Miller, senior vice president of digital media for NBC Universal Sports & Olympics.
Erik Jorgensen, corporate vice president of MSN, revealed that in excess of 3,000 hours of video content, both live and on-demand will be streamlined through Silverlight. In this context, NBCOlympics.com on MSN will not only be the number one online hotspot for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, but also the main source of Silverlight downloads. The website has the potential to spread Silverlight to the point where the plug-in will be able to curb Flash's dominance as a medium for rich media and interactive experiences on the web. Guthrie indicated that it would take end users just ten seconds to download and install the Silverlight browser plug-in.
"Silverlight enables new types of functionality, such as the "control room" view, which allows multiple streams of video to be previewed simultaneously, enabled by the playback performance of Windows Media video on PCs and Macs. The picture-in-picture feature will allow viewers to watch multiple feeds simultaneous and quickly switch to the current feed that interests them most, all in high-quality video. Other features enable users to set alerts so they won't miss their favorite event, and the ability to share a feed they're watching with a friend. Adaptive streaming provides the best possible streaming experience for the viewer, regardless of network conditions, via sophisticated techniques that adjust the delivery bit rate on the fly," Guthrie added.