Silverlight to power the online video portal for the 2008 Olympics

Pretty big news out of CES tonight where Bill Gates gave the keynote. NBC and Microsoft have signed a deal that will make MSN the provider for online content during the 2008 olympics at NBCOlympics.com. The biggest news is that Silverlight is going to be powering the video. Allen Stern has what seems like the scoop but TechCrunch is reporting as is Andy Plesser from Beet.TV.

I didn't get the press release but it's been summarized in the sites above. There is going to be a tremendous amount of attention and traffic on the NBC site and now all of those people will need to install Silverlight in order to see it. That could do big things for adoption and give Silverlight a big penetration boost. Ideally for Microsoft, Silverlight 2.0 will be out so that instead of having everyone adopt 1.0 and have to upgrade, they can go straight to 2.0 which is the most interesting from a platform standpoint.

It's a big win for Microsoft and a good way to get penetration. The only thing that I don't know about is that the people are describing the press release as saying the portal will have an "enhanced playback mode" powered by Silverlight that provides a high quality full screen viewing experience. I'm not sure if that's marketing fluff (because Silverlight does full screen out of the box) or if the Silverlight portion of the site will actually be different from the main site. I think it's probably the former, but that wording gave me pause for thought especially since the current site is using Flash video. If anyone knows for sure, comment and I'll update the post.

Update: I'd forgotten about this, but I was reminded that there was some talk about the 2008 Olympics and Silverlight back at MIX07. Not sure if it's the exact same project, but I'd suspect it is. Seems like this may have been in the works for a while.