Vista wins Olympic gold; XP doesn’t place.
July 1, 2008
An NBC deal means Vista users can watch the entire Beijing Olympic Games through online streaming. But those on XP are out of luck, as are Mac and open source users.
Technically the deal isn’t favoring Vista as such; rather the set-up will only work on Media Center, meaning you’ll need either either the Home Premium or Ultimate editions.
That eliminates an even greater proportion of the potential audience: many business users on notebook PCs will be unable to watch, while handheld devices such as video iPods are also a no-go.
Even those who are able to take advantage of the service will have to download an extra piece of software, Wavexpress, to be able to see the video. As analyst Phil Leigh pointed out to Investors Business Daily, that’s likely to be offputting, particularly given that popular video sites such as YouTube don’t require any additional software.
Wavexpress is actually the key to the deal: it’s fundamentally an agreement between NBC and Wave Systems, which produces the software, rather than NBC teaming up with Microsoft.
It’s likely NBC chose to partner with Wave Systems to make it easier to sell advertising that will be inserted in the videos. It’s likely they’ll be able to command high rates among firms which want to target fans of particular sports. However, it’s questionable whether this will outweigh the potential revenue from broadcasting online to a wider audience through all operating systems (or even just all Windows users).
The broadcast deal partially makes up for Vista’s previous Olympic disappointment. Games organisers originally decided to use XP for all official tasks such as scheduling and tracking results, with reports they feared Vista wasn’t reliably stable enough. They later decided to switch to Unix for the core work, though XP will still appear on many official desktop PCs.
AI
