If you’re paying attention to the Olympic games taking place in Beijing right now, you may be interested in pointing your browser at http://www.nbcolympics.com/. The URL is being displayed fairly regurlarly during coverage, but what isn’t being bragged upon (because only nerds really care) is that the video playback and interactivity on the site was created using Silerlight 2.0 beta 2.
I just got around to checking it out myself this morrning and I was impressed. Not with the user interface, although I have no complaints regarding the UI. It just seems like the same UI could have been created using any number of technologies. What I was impressed with was the quality of the video playback. It has that smoothness that comes with Silverlight, or any WPF-based app. The playback is high enough quality that it really feels like it should be soaking up more bandwidth than it actually does.
Its definitely worth checking out and its always fun to root for your country in sports that you would never otherwise watch if they weren’t part of the olympics!
Posted by liberatedsoftware 