NBC is lame. I’m sorry. They are making it really hard to watch videos of the Olympics anywhere but on their site. That would be fine with me, but as a user with an older Mac, I’m shut out. Their video only works on Windows machines and Intel-powered Macs that support Silverlight 2.0. Yes, I am bitter. And yes, I need to upgrade my computer. (Admitted lameness on my part). But I’m sure NBC could have made some backup video available in a more common format such as Flash or Quicktime. Microsoft, however, sees this as a unique opportunity to showcase Silverlight and got the exclusive.
The mobile version of the site is a little bit better. At least there I can see video highlights of the games, even on my iPhone. (And why can’t I see this on my regular computer again?). But these are only select highlights. I don’t want the commentary, I just want to see the full footage.
But top marks goes to Skyfire, whose mobile browser renders not only Flash videos, but Silverlight ones as well. (It also handles Ajax quite nicely, but that is a different story). You can go to the regular NBCOlympics video site on your phone and watch all 2,000-plus hours of video footage.
Skyfire is available only on Windows Mobile (natch) and on Nokia S60 phones in private beta. (We have 100 beta invites for the first readers to sign up here with the code “Crunch”).
So in order to watch the Olympics full-throttle on the Web, I need to do it with a mobile browser that is still in private beta. Here’s a video of what an NBC Olympics video looks like on a Nokia phone running Skyfire:
I’m a Mac user and I installed silverlight 2.0 and it worked fine.
Same here, silverlight works fine for me.
Same here, using OS X (10.4.11) and Sliverlight 2.0 installed. Videos coming in fine.
Erick I think this may be your problem, not NBCs. I’m not on a Mac but the Silverlight streaming is fantastic, allowing me to watch “my” sports like Table Tennis, which were never broadcast, live and in full (well, half screen) glory.
Given that this is NBC’s first attempt I’m giving them A+. It is not *practical*, or in my opinion even reasonable to ask them to pay close to a billion for the rights and then work to make other sites show (and monetize) the content for nothing.
Dallas is right, I’m using Leopard, with Firefox and installed Silverlight 2.0 and it’s working well.
I read online a few weeks ago that NBC wasn’t going to allow Mac users to view because of a sponsor’s conflict of interest. However, I’ve been watching Live coverage on the Mac since the games started.
Yes, the lameness is on my end. I am still using a PowerPC Mac. Still, NBC could support legacy machines.
Updated the post.
That is the lamest comeback – get a life
You’ve got to be kidding me! A Mac user saying that NBC (or Microsoft, who makes Silverlight) should provide legacy support? Apple barely supports they own old PPC systems, so why should anyone else?
Furthermore, Macs are only a small percentage of the market, and PPC Macs with processors fast enough to run NBC’s Olympic streaming site are a small subset of that. Should they also support the <1% of people who stubbornly choose to use Opera? There’s as many people still running Win98 and Win2K. Should they be supported as well?
NBC’s Olympic site is a fairly impressive technical achievement, and there are reasons that they chose Silverlight instead of Flash. I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to expect that people who are interested in streaming video on the internet would have a computer less than 5 years old.
When it comes to supporting legacy machines, Apple should have handled that better. The whole “universal binary” thing, where every program you download has to be twice as large because it includes a PPC and x86 version was silly, and they should have had a PPC version of Rosetta, that would just dynamically rewritten x86 instructions to work on PPC versions of OS X. Sure that’s technically infeasible, but they should have thought of that before changing architectures (or they should have changed architectures 10 years sooner).
I think he’s referring to the POS site “TV Tonic Olympics on the Go”, which is Vista only w/ Silverlight.
Yea, Silverlight is not supported on PowerPC Mac.
Silverlight platform/browser support:
http://www.micr...all.aspx#sysreq
Nice video quality. What happens when Skyfire has to open up their beta though and they get swamped with users? They are going to need massive server power with the proxy solution they are running. Not sustainable, but good acquisition target for a Google or MSFT that have the server power, though.
Good point, but then that hasn’t stopped oToy (or the 3D Virtual World that is built on top of it) from making a go of it. Of course maybe we need to adjust our expectations of what the cloud is capable of. I recall when I first heard of Meebo, thinking there is no way a cost effective server farm can maintain so many active IM sessions to justify building a community, but sure enough they are doing it. I think advancements in Virtualization and some clever display framework to video stream conversion could make a world of difference. It’s not like they have to have running instances of XP and IE for every user. Of course with Silverlight support maybe they have to be rather close to such a setup.
I don’t see how a PowerPC could do 480 widescreen streaming video. Maybe I’m wrong.
Silverlight works fine on my Intel Macs, but my old PPC is just that. Old. So is my 486.
nbcolympics.com is getting like 50 million pageviews a day…I don’t think they really give a rat’s ass about old school PowerPC Mac users.
Issue a retraction and then declare yourself unworthy of working at a place called TechCrunch. Silverlight 2 works fine on Mac.
The video quality on NBC’s site is pretty freaking awesome (and I’m watching it with Leopard and FF3). The live streaming is the best I’ve ever seen.
Kudos to NBC and Microsoft. This has turned into a nice coming out party for Silverlight.
Thanks for the Skyfire invite code. You just made my evening.
I’ve been watching the videos on the site the last few days and have also had a great experience. The video is really very good.
My favorite two videos:
4×100M race in full HD:
http://www.nbco...hd_swb_hl_l0194
4×100M again this time entirely from the underwater view:
http://www.nbco...nelcode=sportsw
Fun to watch.
Expect a C&D from NBC for putting Olympics video on your website. It’s an NBC exclusive, remember?!
Eric, you probably should just retract this incorrect piece and extend well-deserved props to NBC and Microsoft. The overall quality is pretty excellent – on both Mac and PC.
I’m also living in Australia for a few months (although I’m a US Citizen), and am restricted from viewing the Olympics online. I guess I have to settle for Australian coverage, which isn’t what I’m looking for.
This whole thing is awful! This Silverlight expo is messing up my Olympics. So lame. But I do really need to upgrade my mac…
@parker: yes, buy a pc.
Avril Lavigne will be featured on the Olympics 2008: One World, One Dream soundtrack! It was released today, August 8, 2008 worldwide, but not in the United States, Canada, or Japan. Other artists appearing are John Mayer, Pink, Boys Like Girls, Natasha Beddingfield, Krystal Meyers, & Firelight. More Info http://blog.80m...pics-soundtrack
I’m with you on Silverlight not working on PPC. But your reference to the NBC Olympics Mobile site is a little misleading.
“The mobile version of the site is a little bit better. At least there I can see video highlights of the games, even on my iPhone.”
The link goes to Skyfire, which as far as I can tell, does not work on the iPhone.
Video on mobile.nbcolympics.com, however, does. (it’s in QT format for iPhone users)
I think you are the lame one..older Mac? Get with the times dude! Or…maybe even just try watching it on TV (that’s a television) Or perhaps you could raise the money start your own station and content distributor and you could then watch it on your older Mac.
Eric, you are right. The lameness is on your side. As a developer it infuriates me when people complain program xyz that does something new and spiffy doesn’t work on their stone age computer. (Note to users, we don’t have time to work an extra 2 weeks to a month to get something working on your stone age computer that 2% of the population has).
Your a tech writer, UPGRADE already!!
Seriously?
Do you really think you could do this kind of streaming and quality with Flash? Flash was first to market and it’s popular but Silverlight video is far superior. So is the development experience imho.
Yes, you can do it with Flash. What proof is there that it can’t be done? It’s not about “technology”, it’s about implementation. What can you do in Silverlight that you can’t do in Flash? And how much development experience do you have in Flash? I’ve been working Flash since 5.0 days. It’s not hard, there are a billion tools out there to help do your job, and it’s a proven platform that works on everything out there (except iPhone, but Silverlight doesn’t appear there either).
Flash can stream HD. There is no quality difference. http://www.adob...ideo/hdgallery/
Silverlight is promising, but still has tons of bugs.
My question is, who wants to watch this stuff on your tiny phone or window on a PC when it’s on every other TV channel out there? And hey, given the time difference, you get the added bonus of seeing the ‘Digitally Remastered Version’ of the games!
The TV doesn’t broadcast all of the sports. And when you’re watching something you’re interested in, it tends to switch away to another sport altogether. You don’t get to choose what you watch.
When is someone going to call out NBC’s lameness for running 4 bazillion hours of women’s beach vball instead of something interesting? I know they’re in bikinis, so f’ing what? Show me something interesting. I don’t watch beach vball when it’s on the tv regularly, why would I watch it in the olympics. And universal showing nothing but lame boxing? Come on, the badminton is 10x better…
Hey Erick, i bet you miscalculated how many people would call for your head. even mac users. that is indeed something i didn`t expected either..
just for the record as someone who knows. everything done with the nbc olympic broadcast was able to be done in Flex with the same resolution quality.
BUT
Not with multiple streams going at the same time (see paltalk express, they use flex/java to archive what they do)
Not with the kind of performance you obtain using Silverlight 2.0 compared to Flex (ask any flex developer, lets see if they dare to tell you doing it with one single HD stream would not consume more resources)
Not with the kind of advertising they can use with silverlight.
Not with the DRM they needed.
Not with certain Silverlight only technologies (at the moment, and talking about the ms versions, if those exist elsewhere) like: Smart streaming and smart playback. they save bandwith and resources. very important for this kind of thing.
WHAT needs to be asked is why NBC built a Silverlight Video Player without full screen support if that is pretty much one of the best features in Silverlight?.. passing from regular player to full screen without consuming more resources and with full screen controls intact. now that is why i would like to know. more than likely it was a advertising issue. but i truly would like to know.
The best proof is to check out the chinese version of the coverage. they are using Flash. tell me what difference you see in terms of experience,etc.
Why can’t you do multiple streams in Flash? I see no problem with that. If you can do one stream, you can do an infinite number of streams.
What is this comment about advertising? I don’t understand how Silverlight helps with advertising.
It’s all about implementation, not technology. It can be done in Flash.
silverlight or nbc has crashed my FF 3.0 browser several times now. videos stream for a little while, then kill my machine. the “larger player” in sliverlight also seems to have worse quality. no dice.
Being a Linux user means that I don’t have an option. No Olympics for me.
“Note to users, we don’t have time to work an extra 2 weeks to a month to get something working on your stone age computer that 2% of the population has”
But Flash works fine… why didn’t they just use Flash? It works on all even remotely interesting platforms without bending over backwards. It works on old browser and old operating systems. And the SWF format is open. There are already amazing distribution tools for Flash. Everything to do this already exists. Flash is installed on almost every computer in the world. Silverlight, on the other hand, doesn’t work on everything nor is the player already installed on everything nor comes preinstalled on anything. That doesn’t seem like they made a logical choice to me.
Because Silverlight has much higher quality.
And after stuffing up everyone else by insisting that the swimming schedules be changed to suit US audiences, NBC outdid themselves by failing to broadcast live Phelps’ historic swim.
What a bunch of idiots!!
http://www.news...5016813,00.html
The interesting thing is that NBC’s association with Microshaft seems to be the reason they used Silverlight for the streaming. Maybe to promote the technology and video quality? All other ‘rich media’ elements on the site were built with Flash/Flex. As a Flash/Flex developer, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Go figure…
By the way, I can’t remember a more weak user experience in trying to find event schedules for viewing – online or offline. NBC should have consulted with some usability experts on their listing page. For example: I want to know when I can see volleyball. I can select by sport=volleyball, but the list only shows me what is on today. I’d like to know when during the entire Olympic schedule that will be broadcast without having to click through every day and see – “no, not playing today…[click, refresh] yep, tomorrow…[click, refresh] no…[click, refresh]“.
I think NBC really dropped the ball here. They could have done so much more to create a personal schedule for a user based on sports they would want to see, the times, the distribution method (TV or online). Plus, by asking a user to create a profile for their schedule to be personalized, they could have more social elements to the site, deploy targeted advertising… blah, blah, blah. Opportunity lost. My 2¢.
My four year old PowerBook G4 would be able to stream video easily from their website if they provided it in a more standard format. I don’t know what silverlight is, but that fact that’s it made by Microsoft implies that it’s buggy and uses way more ram and cpu than it needs to. The Primetime coverage is bullshit, too much commentary and Phelps-blowing. Swimming is one of the worst spectator sports I have ever seen and it’s the only sport where you can get so many medals for one discipline – Phelps may be the best swimmer ever but claims that he is the best olympic athlete make me sick. Why can’t NBC get it right and show events instead of commentary – not to mention the ratio of commercials.
Of course, all of these observations may be boiled down to the fact that yet again the coverage is not intended to be good, but profitable.
Live streaming is something Flash doesn’t do well today in either reliability and scalability. There aren’t many good examples of Flash Media Server holding up in large scale events that I’m aware of (and its failures are well documented).
Most of the sites on the Internet this summer doing live coverage of the Olympics are using Windows Media Server with either a Silverlight or Windows Media Player control (the later only works on Windows though). Ironically even the site in China that is publishing Olympics content that Adobe was boasting about last week only uses Flash for the navigation and previously saved videos, and the live broadcasting is done using windows media.
In looking at the NBC site they seem to be publishing Live content with 650kbits streams and using one heck of a good encoder (I would love to know which one. At first I couldn’t believe it was a 650k stream the quality was so good). All of their previously recorded content is then available at up to 1.5Mbits, which is also very impressive (and why the quality looks so good). They are doing adaptive streaming so that on lower bandwidth networks it scales down to a lower streaming rate automatically.
All in all, this is very impressive. You can’t do this with Flash 9/FMS today. You could do lower quality on demand playback, but not this quality of streaming or video.
I just got this SMS message from “Helio” (now Virgin Mobile) while I was reading this techcrunch article – on my phone.
“Watch NBC Olympic highlights, news, results and more on your Helio device! All videos are FREE to stream in the ´Sports´ section of the Helio Video Service.”
No Quicktime, Silverlight or anything needed. I just get it “out of the box”. No it is not a windows mobile device.
DRM in Silverlight is an open barn door.
Am I the only one who is concerned about Silverlight, and the note in the Privacy Policy (linked to just before the installation) that allows “web content provider to request an automatic upgrade of the DRM components on [my] computer” (not just Silverlight components, but the whole computer’s DRM).
In case of such a request, “Silverlight will perform such an upgrade without notification of the user (me) to ensure a smooth video/audio playback experience”.
By installing Silverlight I pretty much allow Microsoft or anybody who requests it to install some DRM on my machine, whether I want it or not.
All in an attempt to stem privacy is this whole issue surrounding SilverLight. I own a power pc mac as opposed to an intel one (and I only bought it maybe 2 years ago) and feel utterly denied with regard to this stupid move on behalf of the Olympics and NBC. Take a note from Youtube idiots! If you want to grab peoples eyes so you can make money on the advertising end, then it seems obvious to make the damn videos available to everyone as youtube video does which is why GOOGLE’S Market share slobbers everyone elses even considering it’s their biggest loss to date! It’s called simple flash movies, it sure as hell isn’t live online! Last I checked this went back to the argument surrounding DRM bullshit and why Steve Jobs finally gave in and started to offer non protected music so one might be able to play it on any damn platform they happened to own at the request of you guessed it Microsoft due to loosing market share with the ipod! Content is just that, CONTENT! I shouldn’t have to own a particular BRAND TV in order to watch the damn Olympics! Why should I be held to that ridiculous standard when viewing the INTERNET! Utterly ridiculous if you ask me. Get a grip NBC, that’s precisely why your gonna fail 10 years out when true control lies with the hands of the individual.
Half of you people don’t know what you are talking about – ’stone age’ computer – what a crock. I have a PPC Powerbook that is 3 and half years old – I hardly call that stoneage. It has a 1.86 GHZ processor and runs Leopard and every other piece of software I have loaded without any problem – it is faster than any PC I ever had that was 3 and half years old and that could run the latest Windows software operating system. This is clearly a deliberate ploy to exclude non Intel MACS – I have Silverlight loaded and installed on my computer and have used it to stream video from other sites – when I try to run the video of the Olympics it gives me the message that it will only work on Intel – why is that when I have the latest version of Silverlight working on other sites?
Why should I spend $2000 which I don’t have when my PPC is running everything I have fine except the Olympics!