by Don Burnett
During his keynote at CES on Sunday, 6:30pm PT, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft has signed an agreement to a partner with NBC Universal to build a Silverlight 2.0 based web broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China. This was a joint deal with MSN where, in addition to the Silverlight win, MSN will be the official home of the 2008 Summer Olympics. This is a significant win for both MSN and Silverlight that will provide users with exclusive access to over 3000 hours of live and on-demand video content. Interactive features that are being developed for the coverage should turn Silverlight coverage on “NBCOlympics.com on MSN” into a ground breaking site and video experience that will redefine how users consume sports content online.
This is the largest, most important Silverlight deployment to date. NBC and the Olympics join several high profile customers and partners around the world have already adopted Silverlight for their next-generation RIAs.
· The Silverlight showcase, which invites customers to showcase their applications, now features more than 100 applications from 30+ countries/regions around the world.
· The Olympics and NBC joins such noteable examples as NBA.com, BMW (Germany), Baidu (China), Discovery Channel (Asia), AOL (US), Entertainment Tonight (owned by Paramount - US), World Wrestling Entertainment, Major League Baseball, CBS, FOX Movies (US), and more who use Silverlight today.
When asked why NBC went with Silverlight for their Olympic coverage, versus other formats like Flash Video (which is currently used on some of the NBC/MSNBC website) the answer was given:
Q: NBC talks about the quality related to Silverlight, what does this mean? Why did NBC choose Silverlight?
A: NBC is committed to providing their viewers the absolute best quality video experience available on the web and to that end they chose Silverlight and the associated Windows Media technologies to make that happen. Silverlight brings support for HD quality video playback through use of Microsoft’s VC-1 codec technology which provides the highest quality video at the lowest bitrates. VC-1 is a SMPTE standard video codec that is used by both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray high definition discs. Additionally, battle-proven Windows Media Services provides unmatched scalability and reliability for streaming video on the web. The combination of Windows Media Services for streaming, VC-1 codec for stream encoding, and Silverlight for playback provides the highest quality video available on the web.
No comments:
Post a Comment