Silverlight and the Olympics live

Building off the great progress of Sunday Night Football, NBC has made some modifications to thier NBCSports.com site to include the Silverlight player as the default experience for playing Olympic coverage. This player utilizes our IIS Smooth Streaming and provides for HD experience, DVR functionality, and the ability to do instant replay in case you want to replay some outstanding event during the live games. Check out some of the new clips @ NBCSports.com!

We also announced some great live events with major music artists as part of a partnership with OurWorld Live (OWL), Billboardlive.com and IStreamPlanet to bring forward some major live concerts for free allowing users to be thier own producer and utilize multicamera angles, and chat with thier friends using Twitter. Check out the replay of the R Kelly show! There will be many more to come, please check out the Billboard live site for more info..

Enjoy the show, er shows! :)

C

Silverlight and Sunday Night Football Extra

Today NBC Universal and the NFL announced their relationship to deliver Sunday Night Football online using Silverlight! They will offer 17 games, online and simulcast with the game including 5 camera feeds so you can chose which ones you want to watch, Slow motion, instant replay, and chat integration. Not to mention you will have live events in the timeline where you can jump right to the action, even if you missed it! It's going to be a great year and looking forward to watching Sunday Night Football on NBC Sunday Night Football Extra.

For those who want implementation details stay tuned and check our team site, what I can say is we are working close with partners like Vertigo to build the experience, IStreamplanet to encode and deliver, Inlet Encoders, and logging/health vendors like Conviva and Omniture. These partners are working hard to deliver a great experience. The season starts Sept 10th @ 8pm hope to see you online.

Silverlight 3 Announced

Today in San Francisco we announced availability of Silverlight 3 and Expression 3. This is a major milestone as we move forward delivering on our advancement of development and design for the web and push the boundries and innovate on key area's of work flow, delivery and experience. Key features such as Sketchflow, Smooth Streaming (live) and Out of Browser push the bar for RIA's and experiences within them. Being able to leverage our 6M developer community is critical to the success of our business and partners have stepped up to deliver very compelling experiences, while solving some very challenging problems for our customers.

We also announced some very important customer use cases with NBC Sports announcing support for Silverlight as the preferred platform for HD delivery moving forward. NBCSports has been a leader in helping to bring about successful applications online with the Olympics, and we are excited to partner with them on many other brands like the AVP, Wimbledon and the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. This partnership will yield great results for consumers as we move forward delivering never before used features online like PVR, Slow Motion, and Instant Reply. We are looking forward to working close with NBC Sports on new and ground breaking applications online.

We also demonstrated the power of Silverlight in the enterprise with Accenture TV which automates and delivers real time video and meta data for corporate communications.

Continental Airlines also demonstrated how they are able to improve customer services with their internal line of business applications for their gate and reservation agents.

You can see all the announcements here in the press room, but overall a very good day today.

Thanks to all that made this happen!

Silverlight Powering Wimbledon 2009 Delivery in HD

For those who have not seen it, Silverlight is powering NBC Sports coverage of Wimbledon 2009. You can check out the player features developed by another terrific Silverlight partner, IStreamPlanet. The player is set up to allow you to watch the various courts at your selection, and to fast forward, rewind, and even instant replay on live feeds. NBC even provides highlights and all the day's footage in case you missed the action.

Thanks to Mio and the crew for a great application, and NBCSports for the great content!

More Silverlight applications

It's always a great feeling to surf the web and see partners pull together great experiences with the technology we help to create. While I always get asked if Microsoft is using Silverlight (the answer is yes, we have over 200+ applications on our own Microsoft.com and MSN.com properties), it's a testament to the explosive growth and the technology itself when you start seeing it show up more frequently in your casual day to day web experiences.

We blogged about this on our team site, but in case you haven't seen it, Nasa has released some footage from the International Space Station and on the Mars Science Lab. These applications use Photosynth, and they demonstrates the power that can be achieved when trying to deliver high resolution images, while also providing the ability to quickly navigate and manipulate large amounts of image data.

The second is the Country Music Awards, as they too have used Deepzoom to manipulate over 850+ images from the Country Music Awards show this week that users have submitted.

C

Netflix and Media Center, and HD video

Today our friends in our Entertainment and Devices group announced that Netflix would be available in Windows Media Center. This is great for Silverlight, as this means that the Silverlight application will now be hosted in Windows Media Center.

There have been lots of blogging and announcements here, but the important thing that this denotes is that this continues to re-affirm our companies commitment to use Silverlight. Silverlight has only been out over 18 months and with over 200+ applications on Microsoft.com and MSN.com alone, we are continuing our momentum and growing market penetration which is great for all the designers and developers out there. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of downloads in the market already (in such short amount of time) thanks in part to our own properties and also those of our partners (like Netflix, Blockbuster, CBS, NBC, HSN, AOL, and many others).

One we just launched was EBay to create an auction item tracker in IE8 that allows you to track auctions in real time from within the browser. SL3 is now in beta and we have seen tremendous demand since our announcements at Mix and NAB. The launch of our Smooth Streaming (click here for a demo of 1080p playback) technology at NAB and the ability to "really" do HD video reliably with PVR over HTTP has helped to drive Silverlight mind share and I would say that the remainder of this year and 2010 will be really great for Silverlight and HD video on the net. Thanks to all of you who are making it happen.

Facebook API's and Brian Goldfarb

I had to post this video of our wise and fearless marketing leader Brian Goldfarb demonstrating the power of Silverlight and WPF at the Facebook conference (per my blog below). Courtesy of Rafe Needleman



Microsoft shows off Facebook Open Stream API demos from Rafe Needleman on Vimeo.