Filed under: technology | Tags: microsoft, nbc, olympics, Silverlight, swimming
I am thoroughly disappointed with NBC at the moment. They are offering high quality replays of Olympic events on their website -so, having missed the Americans stick it to the trash-talking French in the 4 X 100m Freestyle relay, I was eager to watch. I was not only unable to watch it via the NBC website, but anywhere else on the web. First, because the video plugin that NBC uses, Microsoft Silverlight, does not support PPC Apples. It only supports Intel Macs and any machine running XP SP2 or newer. I believe that this unevenly widens the age of Wintel machines that can see the video versus the number of Mac OS machines. In an age where the technology exists for widespread compatibility, not having it is quite sad. Sites like DailyMotion and YouTube very successfully use Flash to have video playable on all sorts of machines. My computer really isn’t that old (3 years old) and definitely runs much faster than many Windows machines that are qualified to play the media. In addition, NBC is waging all out war on Internet media in order to shut down all other leaks, so I’ve really had a difficult time finding the clip. NBC, why not do some sort of joint-venture to expand compatibility and streaming qualities? I’m guessing Microsoft probably offered some sort of sweet deal for exclusive usage.
If you want to access it and have an Intel computer, here’s the link:
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/share.html?videoid=0811_hd_swb_hl_l0194
