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WOW!! Silverlight is powering the NBC Olympics quite well

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/08/18/so-far-silverlight-is-powering-the-nbc-olympics-quite-well

By Emil Protalinski | Published: August 18, 2008 - 12:42PM CT

Last week, I talked about what Microsoft was doing for the Olympics and questioned whether it would all pay off. According to NBC, loads of viewers are tuning in; it's as if the users participating in the video explosion on the Internet have simply said "Olympics? Sure, we'll watch that too."

Among other things, Microsoft is hoping that this embrace will mean a surge in Silverlight installs. The NBC video player, which streams content in 350kbits and 650kbits bitrates using Windows Media Services, is built using Silverlight 2 Beta 2. The Olympics Silverlight application is written using managed code on top of the .NET Framework subset included with Silverlight (all UI in the application is built using WPF). While the Olympics are only just beginning and it's really hard to say how well Silverlight will come out at the end, early numbers show that Microsoft has something to be proud of.

According to data eWeek has obtained, Silverlight is being downloaded 8 million times per day. Compare that to 10 million downloads a day from Flash, Olympics or not, and the number doesn't seem that huge. However, for a fairly new technology, it's something to write home about. So the download numbers are quite high, but that's not the only metric that has to be looked at. Is Silverlight living up to the task of the Olympics? Apparently, it is. On August 11 alone, Silverlight managed to deliver 250TB of data without any major problems. There have been scattered reports of performance issues but these are rare and are most likely due to the fact Silverlight 2 is still in beta; the final version of Silverlight 2 is still targeted for a "late summer" release.

Microsoft claims that it and NBC are enabling viewers to watch more than 3,500 hours of Olympics coverage, 3,000 of those hours being live coverage. NBC has HD cameras in Beijing that capture each event from multiple angles. That video content is then sent to teams of people in control rooms and producers that will do real-time shot selection, after which the video is encoded. Commentary and the play-by-play meta data are then included in by dozens of analysts, and then finally viewers see the video content. All of this is done very, very quickly and content is supposedly seen in almost real-time.

US viewers (NBC only covers the Olympics for the US) who can't typically watch their favorite Olympic sports can now watch basically everything that happens. On NBC Olympics they can either see it live, or even after they've already missed it. The site reportedly attracts over 6 million users daily. On average, users stay about 15 to 20 minutes per visit. These happy new users so far have a very high opinion of both NBC and Silverlight.