Folks, the Olympics 2008 Games in Beijing, China is coming soon on 08/08/08. Sports aside, the most exciting news to me is in fact the deal between Microsoft and NBC to broadcast the Olympics games over the web via Silverlight 2.0. Over 3000 hours of live and on-demand videos will be available exclusively to anyone with Silverlight 2.0 plug-in installed. In layman's terms, you can watch every second of all the games if you have Silverlight 2.0. For more details, read the blog post by Soma Segar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division.
Now let's talk business. Thousands if not millions of people will download and install Silverlight 2.0 plugin. This will definitely bring the "98% of web users can run Flash Silverlight applications" closer to reality. We Silverlight developers would be able to deploy our Java Silverlight applications worry-free over the web, because 98% of all web users could use them right away. And Microsoft might not have to deal with antitrust lawsuits, because they wouldn't need to distribute Silverlight in the automatic Windows Update.
I'll definitely keep an eye on NBCOlympics.com for videos of the Olympics.