With 72 million video streams of NBCOlympics.com viewed through Saturday, developers at Microsoft have reason to celebrate.
The new rich media web plug-in, called Silverlight, which has had
little implementation by the broadcast industry, seems to have
worked well.
On the day of Olympics began, I interviewed Eric Schmidt, Director
of Media and Advertising Evangelism at Microsoft. He is one of the key
team members who has worked with the NBC Sports organization in
implementing Silverlight and the overall workflow of online Olympics
coverage.
He hopes that in six
months Silverlight will be considered by a large number of video
publishers as a distribution platform. Surely the Olympics has been a
very high visibility showcase.
We understand that the site will remain live with video on demand for a while (not sure how long) — so if you missed the games, you still watch online.
Silverlight is Embeddable
In this interview, Eric says that Silverlight 2.0 supports the creation of embeddable video players. Sounds like news to us.
Update 8/27: Ryan Stewart at ZDNet has a global overview on online video viewing of the Olympics.
— Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
