So. Let’s recap 2008’s Olympics coverage. NBC got Microsoft to front a good portion of the development costs for a video platform that didn’t meet expectations, and they forced those who wanted to watch in high quality on-demand to view on Television or on Vista.

That’s good for NBC, their TV ratings have been stellar. While a lot of people watched online, most chose to watch on the main screen most of the time because the digital experience left a lot to be desired.

And it’s great for Microsoft which got its Silverlight adoption event, had no major issues with the Silverlight 2.0 release and received exclusivity over high quality downloadable VOD delivered by TVTonic to Vista machines only.

While some (or many) will whine about the fact that they could have done better, TV has penetration in 98.2% of U.S. homes, it’s still about making money and the Olympics is about selling ads. NBC Universal is part of a publicly traded company and unlike the BBC they’re in business for their shareholders.

We may be less than impressed with what was offered versus what might have been, but when it comes down to it NBC offered more HD television and online video coverage of a live event than anyone ever. They maximized their audience and their profit by using both mediums to their advantage, and if they can do that, why would they do anything else?

NBC has soft launched their Silverlight powered Olympics portal and it’s pretty cool. There should be more to play with as we get closer to the games so it’s not entirely fair to judge it at this point but overall the interface is clean and user friendly, and for the moment at least it seems to work well.

Noticably missing is a full-screen mode, varying quality options, and the picture-in-picture and three small video windows in the 4-screen live video control room are so small that they don’t add much.

Some screenshots are below, check it out for yourself at NBCOlympics.com.

Above: Opening Video Page

Above: Live Video Control Room

Above: Large Screen w/ PIP

The question is whether it will scale, the video quality in the player leaves something to be desired, and it doesn’t appear at least from what I’ve seen that the player is using the adaptive bitrate streaming capability of the Silverlight 2.0 plugin. When there are thousands of concurrent viewers, there may be a completely different viewing experience.

Jimmy Fallon will begin his Late Night run on the web this Fall before to taking over for Conan O’Brien who will move to the Tonight Show next year, reports The Times.

5-10 minute shows will be posted nightly, likely on Hulu and its distribution partners giving Fallon time to “find his show.” The web offers new hosts like Fallon the luxury of time allowing them the freedom to experiment and find what works.

Perhaps if this online buffer period had been possible in the past, we would have avoided some other huge embarrassing talk show failures.

Less than two months away from the beginning of the summer Olympics, NBC has yet to announce their complete technology plans for the games. Here’s what we know:

• Microsoft paid a hefty portion of NBC’s development costs to get them to use Silverlight, and is still working to remove the beta from Silverlight 2.0 ahead of the summer games.
• Microsoft demoed the NBC Olympics site at Mix08, announced the same day that they had formed a strategic relationship with Move Networks, and Move’s CEO hinted late last year that the company would be involved.
• The player was designed by Schematic, the Los Angeles based design company with strong ties to Move Networks. More than 2,200 hours of live video and more than 3,000 hours of on-demand content will be offered through NBCOlympics.com on MSN.
• NBC will use a Media Asset Management System from Blue Order.
• NBC will limit its downloadable ‘On the Go’ Olympic video on-demand service to users running Microsoft Vista. The service, powered by Wavexpress will allow media center users to view downloaded content in up to HD quality, protected by DRM.

The missing piece is the most important part - the live content delivery portion. Clearly NBC and Microsoft will need some very large partners to deliver a live event of this scale efficiently and it seems strange that the company has made so many separate announcements about without any insight into their technology partners and other plans for live.

Burning questions: Who is handling encoding and content delivery? Will there be a login required? How will advertising be integrated and who is managing it? How many concurrent viewers do they anticipate and how many can they support? How will they manage access in order to deliver a high quality of experience for all users? It is not a good sign that these questions are still unanswered so close to the start of the games.

NBC Universal did not respond to e-mailed requests for comment.