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.
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