Why should I spend $2000 which I don’t have when my PPC is running everything I have fine except the Olympics!

Cd4313…

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Silverlight is promising, but still has tons of bugs.

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¢.

What a bunch of idiots!!

http://www.news...5016813,00.html

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.

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.

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.

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).

Your a tech writer, UPGRADE already!!