At the MIX conference this afternoon, Perkins Miller of NBC demoed the Silverlight powered video platform for NBCOlympics.com. Duncan Riley liveblogging for TechCrunch called it “kickass,” and it deservedly got the largest ovation of the day.
The player interface designed by Schematic will offer users the ability to view multiple cameras and multiple events simultaneously, as well as enhanced picture-in-picture, and interactive features for all users watching at a given time.
Also today, Move Networks announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft whereby Move technology will be integrated into the Silverlight plugin, allowing anyone with Silverlight installed to view content delivered by Move without a separate download.
Silverlight 2.0, now available in Beta will support adaptive bitrate streaming, such as that offered by Move and Swarmcast, and will integrate with DoubleClick for ad serving enabling a better user experience and making it far more valuable for content producers.
Considering Move’s success with HD streaming, their involvement in streaming video for the 2008 Olympics, and the fact that NBC will make this the first Olympics offered entirely in HD it’s not a huge stretch to anticipate the games being offered online in HD as well.
The olympics should be a coming out party for Silverlight, giving Microsoft the momentum they need to propel it to a more widely adopted standard.
The NBC Olympics demo is about 1:17 in.
Ah yes “adaptive bitrate streaming”. I was getting 750K-1.5M on ABC/Move on Tuesday night as I watched the primary results come in. (Mierda, la bruja gano) For the Beijing Olympics with so much going on during North American working hours, it’s not hard to imagine them getting decent GRPs over the internet. Maybe 5 million simultaneous? Figuring that Move pushes an “average” bitrate of 1Mb that’d work out to be…..? Way too much for the system to handle. But we’ll get a preview with March Madness soon. Hang on, Ben.
[...] John Malone thinks it will be a bust, the Olympics could be a watershed moment for online video. Early reports indicate the Silverlight technology powering it is amazing, and a grand event like that is [...]
Some of the information in this artcle regarding the partnership between Move Networks and Microsoft is not correct.
Move Networks is not involved in the NBC Olympics Silverlight project.
Adaptive streaming of NBC Olympics video is not being delivered using Move technology or plugin.
Silverlight 2.0 plugin will not have integrated support for Move Networks streaming. That was never the intended plan.
Well, hindsight. The facts are correct, though some of the things I speculated on in this post did not come to fruition.
This was written on March 5, not long after Move’s CEO stated that the company would be involved. It appears that they are working with Televisa for the spanish broadcast rather than NBC.
http://www.onlinevideowatch.com/move-networks-to-support-nbc-olympics/
Microsoft at MIX 08 announced integration of the Move player into Silverlight 2.0. If they went back on this and it isn’t integrated yet that’s interesting, but seems to contradict this story
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=10405&page=3&c=31
If you have more information on this please let me know.
It’s just wrong for NBC to use MICROSOFT technology for providing Olympic content. They should be using W3C.org standards. They are blocking Linux and other non Windows users (BSD, Solaris, UNIX, …).
George, in an ideal world – perhaps. But NBC is not a public broadcasting company like the BBC. We don’t pay them license fees and they don’t owe us anything. They’re a business just like any other, and therefore it is their right to partner with any company they like.
Journalism in the modern usage is one of the younger professions. The first prototype of the modern newspaper was the series of public announcements, known during the Roman empire as Acta Diurna published daily from 59 B.C., and later in Venice as the Gazette.