SuperSite Blog

Speaking of the Olympics...everyone i've talked to is really  impressed with the NBC Olympics site. The Silverlight Feeds might not be HD but there damn close and you can easily tell what the source was.

Heck,Even my sister in law who refused to install the plugin because it was MSFT(she's a macgirl) finally caved in after she saw my laptop with the NBC feeds.

Since all the broadcasts are geo-blocked.....does anyone know how the BBC feeds look? I know CBC.ca uses WMV but it also geo blocked.

a great gadget.

and to a poster above : my firefox 3 crashes when i try to view this site. just a plain crash. that's all. i have the 2b2 version of silverlight installed. still nothing :/ so as far it goes for me, the site is awful :)

dreimanis

The NBCOlympics.com site works fine on both IE8 Beta 1 and Firefox 3 (current released version) for me on Vista Ultimate SP1 so the problem isn't inherent to the site or FF3.

The site should work including videos on:

Internet Explorer 6, 7 for Windows (Vista, XP SP2 or greater and 2003)

Firefox 1.5, 2, 3 for Windows (Vista, XP SP2 or greater and 2003)

Firefox 1.5, 2, 3 for Mac (OS 10.4.8 or greater, Intel only)

Safari 2 & 3 for Mac (OS 10.4.8 or greater, Intel only)

(that's the official list)

From my experience, it also works on IE 8 Beta 1 but that isn't officially supported.

Wow, that's prety slick!

Michael Phelps is the Mac OS of Olympic athletes.

(running for cover)

:)

@ weedmonk, I haven't checked out the BBC's olympic coverage itself (I'm not even remotely interested in the Olympics) but their i-player generally delivers some very high quality content, and in the uk, at least, you can even download a higher quality verision if you want as well.

I do believe their download function still only works on XP and Vista however, due to their requiring the DRM technologies that were so berated for their inclusion in Vista.

btw: I'd like to point out how pleased I am with the discussion on this thread. Pretty much every other public blog comment area that drifted into NBCOlympics.com has drifted into three areas of silliness:

1) It's a conspiracy that the Microsoft/NBC viewer doesn't support Linux (by people who think using a platform with 1% of the market can't have downsides)

2) It's a conspiracy that the Microsoft/NBC viewer doesn't support PowerPC Macs (by people who don't realize that Apple orphaned them)

3) It's a conspiracy that Microsoft/NBC doesn't use Flash instead of Silverlight since the Internet should be about "open standards" (by people who either think Adobe isn't a proprietary company or that "open standards" actually means "not Microsoft")

Seriously, if you start thinking this column gets silly, content free flame wars, browse the rest. Kudos to everyone.

It still early Mike.

Its a conspiracy that this gadget does not include a BSOD counter. <---wink, wink...nudge, nudge...say no more!

Has anybody seen the TVTonic NBC Olympics on the Go add on for Media Center? It is very cool!!!

--tayme

This is interesting:

http://www.wattoogle.com/

>>Every time you load Google with their white background your (CRT) monitor is using roughly 74 watts of power, but every time you load up Wattoogle your monitor is using about 59 watts of power for a savings of 15 watts! As quoted in this blog:

(ecoiron.blogspot.com/.../black-google-would-save-3000-megawatts.html) " Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background [on a CRT monitor! mjo] will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes."

Why would we not do our part when it's as easy as switching home pages? <<

Ocean

Urban legend.

On CRTs the difference in energy use is trival, on LCDs it's zero

I can confirm that it is an urban legend. I used to be an electrical engineer.

I have to admit the Silverlight Olympics site looks impressive. I'm actually having a good time keeping up with the games, because I work night shifts 7 days every other week.

I don't follow the olympics, but I am aware that America's "human Dolphin" is absolutely kicking ***.

surely using him on your team is cheating? It's like using a machine gun or a guided misile at target shooting!

Good find! Your guy Michael Phelps is owning this contest. A great sportsman and a credit to the USA.

@tayme: TVtonic on the Media Center ended up not being as cool as I'd hoped, unfortunately.  They seemed to get a lot right, but it just hogged my computer once I started using it.  I added gymnastics and swimming to "my channels" for quick access, and it proceeded to start trying to fill my HDD with every video posted of those events, while using so much bandwidth my extender became almost unusable.  I did find that you can throttle and schedule the downloads, but I was hoping for more of a stream model, rather than a download model.  If only nbcolympics.com worked on the Wii's internet channel ;)

Also, I know I'm picky, but I don't like programs that don't offer you the ability to get rid of the tray icon when you (theoretically) only need to access it once in a great while.  Hopefully they can come up with a truly user-friendly solution next time!  Like silverlight's version right on the MC...

I was having some trouble with the site about a week ago, but on a whim I just tired it and holy cow it is amazing.

No commercials, except at the start. No commentary, and videos that run several hours!

This is too nice.