NBC Sports will announce plans today  to use Microsoft Silverlight as the software for Web viewing the Winter Olympics Games in the United States.

We have been impressed with the latest use of Silverlight by NBC for Sunday Night Football.  We look forward to watching the Olympics online.  Although, we expect that due to the Pacific time zone many live competitions will be delayed.

Next for Silverlight is downloadable files, videos saved to the computers, according to Microsoft’s Brian Goldfarb, who was a participant in last month’s Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable. He explains in this video.

Although NBC is using Silverlight, virtually all the world’s broadcasters will be carrying the Winter Olympics in Flash.  (We expect that  Silverlight will be used in a handful of other other countries — quite possibly in France where the Tour de France online was a hit.)

The Next Battle: Video on the Smart Phone

Adobe, having achieved ubiquity on the the world’s computers with Flash, will have Flash installed on nearly all smart phones in the United States, except the iPhone. 

Speaking at the panel, and second in this video, is Adobe’s Bill Rusitzky.  Bill talks about Flash and its move to mobile devices planned for next year.

This section of the panel was moderated by Kevin Delaney, Senior Deputy Managing Editor of the WSJ.com

Andy Plesser, Executive Producer