You are not NBC's customer; Microsoft is. I am sure that Microsoft paid a lot of money for this, and it was money well spent.

This is a trend that's only going to continue. I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft sponsor another major video website like Hulu to get Silverlight installed on more computers. I think in a few years Adobe may have to resort to paying to get the Flash plugin installed.

What's the problem really? I just installed Silverlight instead on whining about it.

I saw the same message when attempting to view a video on NBC's Olympics site. After grudgingly installing Silverlight I was still unable to watch anything. The videos require Silverlight 2 or 3, neither of which is supported on a PowerPC mac.

Silverlight does perform significantly better than Flash.

If you have flash and you refuse to install Silverlight out of some moral anti-plug-in stance then you are just being silly. At that point you're just haggling over the price: http://jo-kes.blogspot.com/2007/06/churchill-humor.html

I heard a story from a friend that had to choose between Flash and Silverlight for an on-demand movie project. (DRM was mandatory, so H.264 was out).

Adobe asked for $30.000 for some sort of an Adobe Server. And this included literally no support. They didn't show one sign that they cared for him as a client.

Microsoft was incredibly enthusiastic. They enrolled him in the BizSpark program, gave him all the licenses for free for the first years. At the same time he was getting daily calls from Redmond and Microsoft engineers to see how they could to help him.

I'm not saying this is the case here, still, his site is now using SilverLight too.

Smooth Streaming...seriously, I have never met a single objective person who did not recognize the Silverlight HD streaming solution to be superior to Flash. I will take quality over adoption of an unfinished HTML spec.

So instead of taking one simple step to watch the Olympics in the best quality possible the author would rather rant about wanting to use a technology that doesn't exist yet(HTML5) or use a technology that cannot deliver the the highest quality(Flash). The simple truth is Silverlight has the capability to deliver the most superior quality video. You can argue all day long about how you don't like 3rd party proprietary software, but the fact is, NBC went with Silverlight because it's the best solution that exists today. Sounds like good business to me.

Because of you mentioning the snowboarding video I installed Moonlight only to be confronted with this: "Due to Olympic broadcasting regulations, NBC is only allowed to show Olympic competition video on the internet to users in the United States and U.S. Territories (including Puerto Rico). Users outside of those locations will still have access to an extensive set of non-event video content on NBCOlympics.com including the video listed below."

Now back to uninstalling Moonlight...

Another geek complaining about non-standard plug-ins. I really wish HN had categories so I could filter out repetitive rants.

If the author didn't install Silverlight and watched the video he wanted, that is pure ideology borderline religion and I can't feel any sympathy for him.

Sorry but I'm not a militant ideologist. I'm all about pragmatism and net value. If I have to install a non-intrusive plugin in order to watch a video, so be it.

(If I repeat anything that's already been said, my apologies)

Silverlight is slowly becoming an alternative standard to Flash. Reason being is that it's more based on code rather than the custom resources Flash uses. Sure, you have to install something just like the Flash player but overall, Silverlight loads and runs faster.

I've been catching more and more Silverlight where on heavy video based content. All of Netflix's instant streaming is done through Silverlight. Sure, NBC could have just stuck with flash but honestly, their flash runs like crap.

I'm OK with waiting a moment to install a Silverlight player. Flash users already have to install a new player everytime Flash updates. What's the difference?

I think either way there would be unsatisfied viewers. NBC took a risk. Silverlight is probably one of the only things that Microsoft can impress me with.

"The moral of this story is never make your users jump through hoops to view your content, try your product, or use your services."

The author completely contradicts himself. He's arguing not to use things that need to be installed, yet saying they should have used Flash, which is something you install. Flash is on 98% of computers (his figure) because those people installed it. At some point, they had to jump through a hoop. I haven't need to jump through hoops to view Olympics videos because I already installed Silverlight.

The Olympics should be as open as possible. There has to be some sort of monetary deal between Microsoft and NBC. This really could have been a great time to push HTML5.

Adobe's inability to write code that lasts more than a month between exploits makes me more than happy to use Silverlight for streaming media.

Are you sure this is an NBC thing and not an olympic thing in general?

Because here in Canada we get sent to http://www.ctvolympics.ca and they're using Silverlight as well.

The point is that some people really hate Silverlight, and others simply cannot install it. Why would anyone choose it as the platform for their business?