Olympics like you've never seen them before!

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Martin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:35:29 GMT

Silverlight video spikes my 2.1 GHz dual-core intel mac processors to 180% and, pretty much, if I do anything else, is jumpy and unwatchable. Has anyone else seen this behavior?

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

jerriho — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:13:42 GMT

Regarding the spike, I think it's b/c at this point hardware acceleration is not implemented in SilverLight. It may change in future versions.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Laurent Kempé — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:44:12 GMT

I would enjoy to see that application but leaving in France I don't have access! Too bad

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

xun — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 04:41:39 GMT

Nice usage and showcase of silverlight, though silverlight has a long way to go catching the fire in the development community.

I kept reading about that YouTube is to stream the olympics, however, never see anything.

I mostly just want to watch the opening ceremony, however, could not find it anywhere other than images after images.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

anonymous — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:37:44 GMT

great video codecs which ship with Silverlight. lol. H.264 is even more great. why not use an industry standard like H.264? Today's CPUs/GPUs can easily play H.264, servers can encode H.264 in real-time. Only Microsoft products like Windows Media Services 2008, Silverlight don't support H.264.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Jon Breen — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:02:25 GMT

"Olympics like you've never seen them before!".... well, that's a bit sensational. It's not like it's 3d or Smellyvision. It's just SIlverlight. It would have been better if they had used the Flash 9 beta with 264 support, but you stick with your sensationism! I know for a fact that MS pay companys to deploy Silverlight and WPF apps. All of them dismal... even if it's a monopoly like the NBC Olympics.

In other news.... "Olympics like you've never seen them before!" on the BBC in, er, Flash.

Silverlight Cream for August 17, 2008 -- #349

Community Blogs — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:17:44 GMT

Bill Reiss announced a SL Game contest, Matt Berseth with Custom DataGrid icons, Palard Julien provides

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Good Point — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:56:43 GMT

"It takes less than 10 seconds for a user who doesn’t have Silverlight installed to download and install"

... For those who don't mind installing a "Beta 2" release on their systems.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Sam — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:38:46 GMT

For everyone who is ignorant and skeptic about silverlight, you can play and taunt with words but the numbers stated by soma deserve credit.

"in the first four days of the Olympic games, there were 13.5 million video streams, 16.9 million unique users, and 291.1 million page views."

That itself proves that Silverlight is a HUGE success and a slap in the face for skeptics. Mind you this is just a beta version - and an important event like olympics is being delivered using a beta product "successfully". Wait till the final version is released! I have downloaded and used silverlight beta 2 on my systems (XP, Vista running IE, Safari and Firefox 2) WITHOUT any issues whatsoever.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

wvaneck — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:50:36 GMT

Although that I am disappointed that Microsoft limited the use of Silverlight to the U.S. only and not took the opportunity to find other broadcasters in other countries to spread the install base of Silverlight even more, I enjoy creating SL applications.

I have to put the numbers in perspective though. 291.1 million page views means nothing, it just means a lot of people visited the NBC Olympics web site. 16.9 million unique users doesn't mean that those were SL ready visitors. The only number that means some thing is the 13.5 million video streams however it doesn't state that those streams were from unique visitors which could mean that there were only 3.4 million unique SL users responsible for the 13.5 million streams :-)

And that my SL friends is my disappointment and scare for the future of SL. If MS would have found other broadcasters in other countries the uptake of SL would be tremendous. Now we have to wait and see if the rest of the world (the users that is) is willing to install a plugin to visit a web site hosting SL for "no reason".

There will be allways cry-babies out there but that is what they are geeks in a basement, without the intellect to convince their IT manager / customer to go with alternate technology (if they are actually working). Most likely they don't work and that's why they have the time, besides playing video games in the middle of the night to create nameless open source projects immitating MS products. :-)

Anyways... SL works, it is still in BETA so you might run into undeveloped pieces or small bugs but in the end, use the appropriate technology to fit the need.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Sam — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:46:41 GMT

wvaneck, your post is purely based on assumptions. The bottomline is 13.5 million video streams in *first four* days of the olympics. That shows scalability and that silverlight works - even in beta as a technology solution. As for the user and world adoption part and the applications of Silverlight, we have to wait and see. If people (users and developers) like it, they WILL adopt it.

Nevertheless, its a very promising product with main focus on creating visually appealing applications for the web and users. Lastly, developing applications using WPF or Silverlight is so much easier and interesting than Flash or any other competitor.

Wishing Silverlight great success.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Geoff — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:24:59 GMT

Hi, I am a coder and a weightlifter so from a weightlifting perspective I was very happy to be able to see what for me was good quality video of all the weightlifting events.

From a coding/architectural perspective I am very interested in how the architecture was designed to handle the large volume of traffic and how the traffic volume was estimated. Thanks!!

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Rich — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:53:13 GMT

I for one, thought the SL content was awesome. I thought the UI was perfectly designed. The picture in picture content was a new one for me. I’d like to congratulate the developers that came up with this, they did a terrific job.

-Dont hate just to hate. If you do your stupid.

Juegos Olímpicos como nunca se habían visto antes

Blog de Soma en español — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:48:53 GMT

Juegos Olímpicos como nunca se habían visto antes Publicación del inglés original : Viernes, 15 de agosto

您从未见过的奥运会！

Joycode@Ab110.com — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:16:15 GMT

原文地址： Olympics like you've never seen them before! 原文发表时间： Friday, August 15, 2008 1:11 PM 在过去的这个星期里

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Jack — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:48:10 GMT

I find it hard to judge video quality in a small window without full-screen. It is when you have the video full screen that all the problems become evident. From what I saw, there was no way to make it full screen. Also, it seems youtube allowed full screen video but kept people from the USA from accessing the sight. Not being able to see full-screen videos really hurt the perception of Silverlight vs Flash

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

gb — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:40:05 GMT

I was forced to use Silver light because there is no other option. I donot like Silverlight and windows media player. Silverlight is disguised version of Windows media player. I do not want to load a beta product.

So, like windows at work, we are just forced to use silverlight. Good job.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Andrew Waters — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:12:02 GMT

Soma, is there any update on the availability of Silverlight on the Nokia s60 platform. Following the superb demo at Mix I have not seen any updates or roadmap?

As I live in the UK there is no access to the NBC coverage which is a pity as it would have been good to see Silverlight put through its paces.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

vattimo51 — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:58:52 GMT

So folks are excited about client-side scalability of less than one stream per unique user: 13.5 million video streams, 16.9 million unique users....

Of course, that's the worst case scenario (but that's all the info

Soma provided). wvaneck points out the ratio could be much better, but there's not enough information to say.

Soma/Microsoft needs to provide more information to excite us all about Silverlight -- and to convince us it is ready to take on the world!

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

WhatCanYouDoForIt — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:39:01 GMT

vattimo51, you can keep bringing up negative speculations. Ask what you can do for Silverlight (get involved, try it out), not what it can do for you (wait for it to take off first and then you get involved).

I am a very satisfied user of the nbcolympics website player in silverlight. In fact watched the entire Soccer and Basketball gold medal games without any glitches. Quality of the video was just amazing!

There are plenty of websites out there that are already using silverlight in its beta form. Go check out WWE, nba.com (when season starts - to watch the game highlights), memorabilia.hardrock.com, uvntv, several microsoft websites and many more.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Ashutosh — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:46:05 GMT

Hi,

3 cheers for Silverlight Player. I think it misses one big functionality which flash player has....view the video in full screen mode.

I would love to see more websites using silverlight player.

Cheer and Namaste!

Ashutosh

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

SB — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:28:45 GMT

The democrats are using silverlight for their convention website and videos (along with move network). See: http://www.demconvention.com/

This clearly shows how fast and quick silverlight is appealing to everyone. Imagine they are trying to convey to millions of americans their message using silverlight and not flash.

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

Somasegar — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:41:59 GMT

Hi Andrew,We are working on the S60 version of Silverlight, but don't have any specifics to say now about delivery timelines.

As we make some more progress, you can expect to hear more from us on this.

-somasegar

re: Olympics like you've never seen them before!

kamii47 — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:00:27 GMT

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