NBC

NBC Not Dumping Silverlight

Posted by Sam Churchill on September 11th, 2008

NBC raised eyebrows when it live-streamed its first NFL game last week using Adobe’s Flash, notes New TeeVee. There was speculation that the peacock had unceremoniously dumped Microsoft Silverlight after the technology’s debut during the Olympics.

Not true, according to both Microsoft and NBC. The network had a separate deal with the NFL that was in place before the Olympics, and the two had nothing to do with each other.

The live, online webcast of the Democratic National Convention was the first large demonstration of the integration of Move Networks and Silverlight. Move Networks supplies the encoding/player/streaming technology, while companies like Limelight Networks, Akamai and Level3 provide the content delivery network.

Nielsen Media Research reported estimate that 4.7 billion people world-wide tuned in to the Olympics at some point, a new record. But that was an extrapolation, says the Wall Street Journal. Nielsen had data for only 37 countries. These include many large countries, so their combined population is four billion — 60% of the world’s population. So Nielsen extrapolated to the other 150 or more countries.

The Olympics, with its 20,000 journalists, has left town, but the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing, September 6-17, 2008, is going strong, if spottily covered by news organizations.

There are a total of 20 competition venues and six independent training venues serving the entire Paralympic Games. Of the 440,000 Paralympics volunteers, 90% were Beijing Olympic volunteers.

Through the Summer Games’ first 11 days, NBC averaged 29.6 million viewers a night for its prime-time show, up from a 26.2 million average during the same period for the Athens Games four years ago.

“More than 6 million people accessed NBCOlympics.com using their cell phone,” said Rebecca Tong, product line manager for Sun’s x64 systems used by NBC. “They weren’t doing that four years ago at the last Olympics.” NBC used a total of 160 Intel Xeon-based Sunfire x4450 x4150 servers to support its Web site coverage of the games.

The Chinese share was record breaking — a full 94% of the world’s most populous country tuned in. It was also the most-viewed show in U.S. TV history, with 211 million watching some portion of the Games and an average daily audience of 27 million, Nielsen said.

source : dailywireless.org