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NBC, with help from Microsoft and several other technology companies, is attempting every unprecedented online show of the Summer Olympics.

Beginning at the opening of day this morning with women’s soccer, the television broadcaster is planning to put 2,200 hours of live, streaming coverage of the Games in Beijing on NBCOlympics.com, which will use a custom video player built on Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 technology.

The effort is the same of the most ambitious combinations to this time of Internet and television coverage of a major lively occurrence and comes with a host of business and technology challenges.

If lucky, it exercise volition showcase the Internet’s ability to amass abundant audiences around niche topics — in this case less-popular Olympic sports that rarely see television coverage — and profit from them.

“It’s amazing how much in greater numbers accessible every one of these tail sports are that you would never see on air,” said Rob Bennett, general manager of pastime, video and sports at Microsoft’s MSN entrance. Think wire-to-wire coverage of fencing, table tennis, trampoline and archery, to title a not many.

Forrester Research analyst David Graves is expecting a “a enormous super-glitzy, long-tail event.”

“These are events that are not, in most cases, big enough to warrant being on one of the main channels,” he said. “But the Internet doesn’t have that problem.”

The Olympics could also be a huge boon for Microsoft’s Silverlight, a new competitor to Adobe’s nearly universally present Flash technology for online video and delicious Internet applications.

To get the full experience, NBCOlympics.com viewers will have to download a Silverlight plug-in — a quick, straightforward process.

The video player is designed to qualify to a viewer’s Internet connection, giving the best represent it can handle smoothly. The player offers four-stream simultaneous viewing; picture-in-picture; community-sharing features; data overlays; and streaming text commentary from NBC Sports editors that’s linked to specific frames in the video.

Viewers of on-demand events will be able to click on text describing the bring to an end of a race, for example, and the video will push closely to that point.

“That I think is going to help redefine the way that people experience sports online and any put in practice appease online,” Bennett said.


Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008094435_msnolympics06.html?syndication=rss