On the same day rumors circulated that Microsoft is seeking to offload Agency Avenue A Razorfish to WPP, they  announced a strategic investment with Move Networks. Both of these are very good moves.

Say you’re Microsoft, the former king of the software biz which is trying to stay relevant as digital invades and transforms media. Old enemy Apple is encroaching on core businesses, won by focusing on usability. Google has beaten them by aggregating global audiences and changing how ads are sold.

What Microsoft lacks focus, they make up for in talent and critical core competencies like scale, global reach and relationships with multi-billion dollar corporations. Microsoft must reassert itself by positioning Silverlight and other key products as the technologies used by mainstream media and major corporations.

By investing in Move, Microsoft gets a partner with which to push their NextGen video technology to major media. Among its partners Move counts ABC FOX, and a growing number of international broadcasters. While currently most Move partners use ON2’s VP7 codec, there’s no reason they couldn’t switch to Silverlight and VC-1 at any time.

It’s interesting to consider the Move-Microsoft relationship in the context of larger working relationships with CDN Limelight, design firm Schematic, as well as Disney, FOX and a number of other mainstream media companies. Together these powerbrokers have formed something of an oligarchy in online video player development and content delivery which could become a front for Microsoft and other Adobe competitors.

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.