Breaking News: NBC Universal Selects Microsoft and Silverlight to Power Olympics Video
Just received news out of NBC Universal that they have selected Microsoft to host the online video portal for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The site will be available at NBCOlympics.com and will be powered by Microsoft's Silverlight platform.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Olympics pick lands in the middle of a deliberate Microsoft media push: at CES 2008 alone the company confirmed entertainment partnerships with NBC Universal, Disney-ABC Television Group, and MGM, making NBC Universal both a CES partner and now a platform customer. For Silverlight — still the challenger to Adobe's entrenched Flash player — the assignment is the highest-stakes showcase available: every visitor to NBCOlympics.com during the 2008 Beijing Games becomes an involuntary Silverlight install test.
NBC Universal gets a technology partner rather than a commodity CDN relationship, tying its biggest digital audience event of the year to Microsoft's client runtime just as broadcasters begin treating live-event streaming as a differentiator rather than an afterthought.
First-order effects
- Visitors to NBCOlympics.com will need Microsoft's Silverlight runtime to watch Beijing Games video, giving Silverlight a mass-install event no marketing budget could buy and putting Adobe's Flash on notice in the live-sports segment.
- Microsoft gains a flagship reference customer in broadcast video, which its sales teams can cite against Flash when courting other US networks and rights holders.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks and sports rights holders face pressure to pick a rich-media platform for their own tentpole events, turning Olympic-scale broadcasts into a bake-off between Silverlight and Flash rather than a default Flash win.
- Adobe must respond on the exact ground where Silverlight is strongest — high-profile live video — or cede the 'premium broadcast' positioning even if it keeps general web-video share.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, major sporting events become recurring procurement moments where broadcasters choose platform vendors, entrenching a two-horse runtime market and making exclusive streaming deals a competitive weapon between Microsoft and Adobe.
- Broadcasters shift from owning their video stack to renting one from a platform vendor, trading control of the viewing experience for scale and reliability they cannot build themselves.
The trend: Tentpole live events like the Olympics are becoming the proving grounds where broadcasters choose web-video platforms, and platform vendors are buying credibility through exclusive streaming deals.