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Olympic Fever
 The Olympics are finally here. What has been hyped to be best Olympic games to date has in no way fallen short of this suggestion. A stunning opening ceremony, all-star athletes, and endless television coverage to keep us involved helps make the 2008 Summer Games simply amazing.
But what's even more exciting for us "technophiles" is what's happening out here on the web. For the first time in Olympic history, you can watch almost any round of any event live on the Internet. All 2,000+ hours of it with an additional 3,000+ hours of on-demand coverage available as well.
NBC has certainly outdone themselves this year with such an unprecedented amount of coverage. Coverage that is all available at NBCOlympics.com (click here to get right to the video coverage). To take it a step further, NBC even invites you to remind yourself when your event is about to air live. The system will prompt you to enter your email address, at which point they will email you 30 minutes prior to the event's start time.
This certainly is going to be a true test of technology for NBC, Microsoft, whose Silverlight technology helps play the video, and Limelight Networks that routes the traffic and helps deliver the content to its appropriate destination. Never before has so much content been available for one event.
NBC had originally considered using Adobe's Flash for its video streaming, but after some convincing from Microsoft, it decided to use its Silverlight technology which has similar capabilities to Flash but allows for more high-quality streaming. The Silverlight technology also allows users to watch multiple events using picture-in-picture and also features a control room experience.
This is just another great part of the ever-changing Internet and what makes our jobs here more interesting every day!
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