On August 8th, the Summer Olympic Games will start in China. To coincide with that, Microsoft has persuaded NBC to use Silverlight 2.0 for online coverage. With millions of people expected to watch the games online, this could very well be fastest deployment of a new online technology.
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As a part of this, we will provide users with exclusive access to over 3000 hours of live and on-demand video content via Silverlight streaming. This means that viewers can access every minute of every event. Additionally, the amount of meta-data attached to each of the streams will be extensive and include links to player bios, medal counts, shortcuts to particular events (i.e. athlete x’s third long-jump attempt), maps of the Olympic facilities, pop-up overlays with real-time event alerts, headlines, video search capabilities, etc.
Silverlight is Microsoft’s newest attempt at a rich client interface for browser-based applications. Unlike previous attempts such as ActiveX controls and embedded WinForms, this time around they are paying attention to important concepts like cross-platform compatibility.
Version 1.0 of Silverlight is already in production. It is based on XAML and Jscript and is interpreted. Version 2.0 of Silverlight will add a lightweight version of the CLR. This gives it the ability to use compiled DLLs written in .NET languages such as VB and C#. There is also a hosted compiler/interpreter, allowing it to support languages such as VB, Python, Ruby, and PHP.