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.