Cool Site: NBCOlympics.com

NBCOlympics.com will be the largest online media event ever done on the web and the coming out party for Silverlight 2. NBC paid $3.5 billion for exclusive media rights in the USA to the Olympic Games through 2012, which includes Beijing in 2008, Vancouver in 2010 and London in 2012.

MSN is providing distribution of NBC Olympics video content to tens of millions of fans in the USA more than 2,000 hours of live content and 3,000 hours of on-demand video to full-event replays and highlights. The site itself is designed to handle more than 2.3 terabytes/second of traffic to provide a flawless viewing experience for fans. By comparison, NBC streamed two hours of live footage at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino.

In mid-July, 85 percent of NBC’s online ad inventory for its Summer Olympics coverage was sold out to companies such as McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Hilton, Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch. These video ads are delivered through DoubleClick In-Stream. According to Nielsen NetRatings NBCOlympics.com recorded 54 million page views in USA for the first six days of the games with an average visit-length exceeding 13 minutes per visit.

NBCOlympics.com The enhanced Silverlight video player will enable fans to watch up to four of the 20 live streams simultaneously in the Live Video Control Room or watch a higher resolution video with support for a second picture-in-picture video.

NBC has provided a variety of resources to help fans get a better understand of upcoming events and the athletes competing in them. These resources include:

• A complete programming and competition schedule for all 35 Olympic events.
• A library of more than 21,000 pages of content
• 1,100 athlete biographies (including all US athletes)
• Insights from 27 NBC commentators including former Olympians. The Associated Press will be the primary source for recaps and previews of all the competitions.
• Country profiles for all 205 participating nations including general data and Olympic history and outlooks.
• Exclusive images and commentary of the the day’s competitions.
• A real-time medal tracker with links to recaps and highlights of the competition, as well as related content such as medal ceremonies, and historical medal standings standings.
• Customizable daily email newsletters on the events.
• Direct and first-hand athlete responses to fan’s questions, called "Athletes Voice".
• A number of Olympians are contributing home-videos to the "Olympic Insider" blog to provide insight into their personalities and their sports.
• Widgets, powered by Clearspring, for a number of social networking and bookmarking sites, as well as desktop gadgets
• Support for mobile devices include mobile web, alerts, TV and video

The MSN homepage prominently features a dynamic Olympics Silverlight module (this really will help drive Silverlight deployments), which will enable people to see results (or hide them if you don’t want any spoilers), get the latest news and see exclusive video coverage. The MSN folks have also created a cool new Toolbar that gives you one click access to the medal tally and many other highlights.

Zune Marketplace has kicked off a series of daily 2008 Olympic Games videos from NBC Sports, giving viewers special on-the-go access to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Footage includes memorable highlights from the opening and closing ceremonies, “best of” compilations, “best match” replays and a post-Games wrap-up feature. Fans will be able to download each episode onto their Zune device for viewing whenever and wherever they go.

Additionally, XBOX users are able to purchase and download a daily wrap-up of the day’s events from NBC Sports, with a complete wrap-up at the end of the Games.

Fans can also head for NBC Olympics On the Go service in the Online Media strip in Windows Media Center.

For a behind-the-scenes look at what was involved, check out the Olympics channel on onTen and CNET’s take here, along with press coverage of Microsoft’s participation in the Games, including yesterday’s Seattle Times and today’s Seattle P-I.