You can imagine my excitement, since 2007 was the year we found out every athlete in organized competition juices.

Ooooo, great - are they going to use the dumb proprietary viewer? Or make you install Silverlight ?

Oh, never mind. Duh.

Shows you I'm not just jaded - but prophetic.

I am all up for downloading all plugins needed to enhance my web experience... Is there a way to run silverlight on Linux? As of today (and maybe during the Olympics) no luck. And then there's the "maybe my Cable provider will block the Olympics on NBC because, even if i pay to see it, some crappy local channel will declare it's their birth right to transmit it" issue.

You point out that "it's all happening on Silverlight, not Flash."

As a Mac user, my happy refrain is actually "it's all happening on Silverlight, not DRM'ed Windows Media Player like Netflix's Watch Instantly feature."

You see, I'll happily take web distribution of content in the form of Silverlight, which is cross-platform (wow ... thanks Microsoft!) and trots along happily on my Intel Mac, instead of something that is locked into Windows.

Flash is OK for handling video, but apparently doesn't offer the DRM lockdown studios demand for stuff like this. Maybe Netflix will keep an eye on this and switch their Watch Instantly feature over to Silverlight, as well.

Is this US only?

Gah! Just checked . .I guess not. ugh, no hammer throw for me!

Microsoft is making a silverlight plugin for linux called moonlight. Yes this a plugin that you must install, Silverlight is going to be a flash killer capable of handling high def video with option for drm. Its available world wide.

@whiskey: I've been teaching myself WPF and Silverlight lately. As far as I know there is no linux plugin, but there is a group working on Moonlight: [www.mono-project.com] - to resolve that.

@bitfactory:
I'm pretty certain spending literally seconds installing Silverlight won't kill you... considering you probably have installed plugins for other inferior technologies such as Flash or Java.

Having followed Silverlight (aka WPF/E) for a while, this is awesome to finally see it used on a major scale. Hopefully this will help promote other to adopt these advanced technologies.

Yea, that's what the world needs, another MS format that will probably bring down your whole machine for the duration of the Olympics - and if it works, the only thing you'll be watching are a bunch of ads followed by a trailer of Olympic highlights and then undoubtedly the MS BUFFERING, BUFFERING symbol. NBC is an idiot to choose MS over iTunes even if MS will pay them to be their partner ... You can be sure of one thing in technology - if MS is selling it or joinng it, you want to choose anything else - Silverlight will be smart as their last technology choice - the now dead HD and the now dying Plays4Sure DRM. 10 years ago, you were riding with BG's brains, now, you're getting Ballmer's brains - not really even remotely the same thing.