Beyond Binary

Updated 9:20 a.m. PDT, with comments from conference call and at 10:20 with additional comments regarding Silverlight and the iPhone.

Microsoft on Monday announced, as expected, that it is ready with a final version of its Silverlight 2 media player.

Silverlight 2 will be available for download starting Tuesday, Microsoft said. Among the new features are support for digital rights management technology, improved cross-platform support and deep zoom technology. Microsoft also announced a range of new partners including AOL, Blockbuster, CBS College Sports, Toyota, and Yahoo Japan.

Microsoft also disclosed some numbers for the Olympics work it did with NBC. Over a 17-day period, Microsoft said NBCOlympics.com had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video watched.

Overall, Microsoft said the Olympics helped boost Silverlight's U.S. penetration by 30 percent, the software maker said.

"We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed," Microsoft developer unit VP Scott Guthrie said in a statement.

Still, that means Silverlight continues to have a very long way to go to compete with Flash, which is installed on nearly all Windows PCs.

On a conference call, Guthrie said that in some countries, Silverlight already has 50 percent penetration. He said he expected deployments would "accelerate quite nicely" as some of the sites that require Silverlight 2 get up and running. In all, he said he expects hundreds of millions of PCs to be running Silverlight 2 "very quickly."

"Certainly coming out with a new browser plug-in is an ambitious project," Guthrie said. "We knew it was going to take a couple of years to get where we need to be."

Guthrie said he feels pretty good that Silverlight is already at the one in four number and said that the company will continue to do deals to boost penetration, as it has with HP which includes Silverlight on its PCs.

Existing users of both Silverlight as well as the Silverlight 2 beta will be automatically be upgraded to Silverlight 2 over the coming weeks, he said.

Later in the call, Guthrie reiterated Microsoft's interest in trying to see Silverlight running on the iPhone.

"We have talked with Apple," he said. "We are very interested in being able to run on the iPhone."

However, he said that Apple ultimately controls what types of software run on the iPhone and right now they are not looking to enable browser plug-ins of any flavor. "They might in the future," he said. "Right now that isn't an option for any vendor"

Google's G1 Android phone is another story, Guthrie said. "That is an open platform," he said. "That is something we are going to look at."

As for compatibility with Google's Chrome browser, Guthrie said the initial release had a couple of issues with Silverlight, but he said that in the latest developer release of Chrome, Silverlight 2 works "fantastically well."

Disclosure: CBS College Sports is a unit of CBS, as is CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News.

Among the new features that the NHL is adding to its video streaming service are added stats and a play-by-play "ice tracker."

(Credit: National Hockey League)

The National Hockey League figures its teams do a pretty good job of connecting with the ice junkies in their own backyards.

But the league reckons that many of the 20 million hockey fans in North America don't live near their favorite teams. The league is hoping that improvements to its subscription video service will appeal to the diaspora.

The league has been streaming video for a while now, said Perry Cooper, the NHL's senior vice president of direct and digital marketing. As it did last year, those that pay $159 a year ($169 after October 15) gain access to nearly all games, including the ability to watch up to four games at once.

New this year, though, the league has moved to Flash-based video that it says more Mac and PC users will be able to use, Cooper said. The league will also pick one game each day to offer with multiple camera angles, and offer added stats as well as the ability to play back games on demand.

Major League Baseball offers a streaming video service, MLB.tv, while the National Basketball Association offers online streaming as an added service for those that pay for its League Pass service on digital cable or satellite.

Cooper rejected the idea that the new video service is destined to be a niche product. While hockey may not be as big as baseball or basketball in the U.S., hockey fans also lack the plentiful television options available to watch out-of-area games.

"A lot of fans are displaced and don't have regular or immediate access to their favorite team," Cooper said. Not to mention all those hockey-crazed Canadians.

And the idea that hockey fans maybe aren't the most tech-savvy bunch? Also bunk, Cooper assured me. (I actually didn't need all that much convincing, being both a hockey fan and well, reasonably tech savvy.)

"It's a common misconception among the marketplace, the media, and sports fans that hockey fans are something less than affluent," Cooper said. "It's the complete opposite," he added, saying that hockey fans are more likely than other enthusiasts to have things like digital video recorders and broadband connections.

I tried to pin Cooper to the boards until he gave me some hard numbers on subscription projections, but was unable to get specifics.

"We have high hopes," he said.

As for offering games for paid download, Cooper said to stay tuned.

"We're working on that right now," he said. "It's a decision we are going to make soon." Asked whether the league would work with all the major services or go exclusively with one, Cooper said that, too, is still being worked out. "There are advantages to both," he said.

Stage 8H is best known as the place where Saturday Night Live is filmed. This week, though, it's been turned into an ad-hoc data center as part of NBC's efforts to stream thousands of hours of live Olympic coverage over the Internet.

Instead of the usual crop of comedians, NBC will have dozens of people watching every hour of the games, looking for highlights that it can chop up and make available on-demand. It's just one piece of an elaborate arrangement that shuttles the events in Beijing back to the U.S.

From each of the dozens of Olympic venues, a high-definition video feed is delivered over fiber-optic cables to the International Broadcast Center that has been set up in Beijing. A bunch of encoders and Windows Media servers get the video into an Internet-ready format. From there, it travels via satellite to NBC's headquarters in New York.

There, NBC actually adds a one-minute delay, allowing its cadre of live bloggers in Stamford, Conn., and elsewhere to write their text and have the video and commentary synchronized. Once ready, it goes from NBC to Limelight Networks, a content delivery network, which has 1,000 servers just for the live events sending the content to various Internet service providers, who then shuttle the content directly to their customers. (See chart below)

(Credit: Susan Dove/CNET News)

Making it play
Limelight Chief Strategy Officer Mike Gordon said his company is prepared for this to be the biggest live event the Internet has ever seen. "I would not be surprised at all to get 1 million viewers," he said. "We're certainly prepared for whatever the audience turns out to be."

Mike Gordon, chief strategy officer, Limelight Networks

(Credit: Limelight Networks)

That said, there is clearly an element of risk in all this, considering NBC's history of live Olympic streaming has been limited to broadcasting a single game, the gold medal ice hockey match in Torino, Italy, two years ago.

"NBC has always taken risks and is always trying to do more than it has in the past," said Perkins Miller, the NBC senior vice president in charge of the Internet push. "It does keep me up at night when I think about streaming 2,200 hours (of live coverage)."

The massive effort has come together in a remarkably short amount of time. Microsoft's deal to power NBCOlympics.com dates back only to January.

NBC had a pretty good idea what they wanted to do and had built some mock-ups of the player prior to deciding to partner with Microsoft.

Initially, they expected to use Adobe's Flash, given that is the standard for video delivered over the Internet these days. But, as they began to hash things out with Microsoft during a series of all-day meetings at NBC's 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters, Microsoft was able to show NBC some ways it could do more using its homegrown Silverlight technology.

Silverlight, Microsoft said, would be key to enabling NBC's vision of a "control room" in which a viewer could watch multiple live streams at once.

Perkins Miller, senior vice president, NBC Universal

(Credit: NBC)

Even within Microsoft's team, though, there was some apprehension of whether it was doable.

"Can we actually pull this off?" Senior Technical Evangelist Jason Suess recalled thinking. "Is the user's machine going to be able to maintain four connections at one time?"

The key, Suess said in an interview at Microsoft headquarters last week, is using an approach known as adaptive streaming in which the player has the ability to customize the bit rate of the video stream based on a computer's connection and processing power.

By Valentine's Day, they were ready for a test. It was pretty important that the test work out, given that NBC was getting ready to crate up the gear to ship it off to Beijing.

"That was the first time the player came to life," Suess said. "Obviously the player was extremely crude."

Making it pay
One of the last pieces to fall into place was the advertising. Initially, NBC and Microsoft were hoping to be able to insert full video ads into the live streams, but doing so is tough work.

"You don't have any way to pause a live stream," Suess said. "Trying to deliver a video ad on top of that, you hit the limits of a user's bandwidth."

As of mid-April, they were still struggling with what to do and began considering that perhaps they would have to just rely on companion advertising around the video stream. Then they came up with an idea. Rather than insert full videos into the live streams, what if they stuck a display ad into the video, particularly during dead times in the action.

Jason Suess, senior technical evangelist, Microsoft

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News)

That, approach, which is ultimately what's being done, solved several issues. It was less bandwidth-intensive than video ads, but still got the advertiser directly in front of the viewer, all without interrupting any of the coverage. The amount of advertising will vary, Suess said; "It depends what is happening in the sports. We just wait for a dead space."

By early May, NBC made the basic player available on the Internet, using a variety of prerecorded Olympic video, and by early June the enhanced Silverlight player was made public as well. The Olympic Trials, at the end of June, offered the companies and the public a chance for a test drive.

At this point, it's come down to a triage of the few remaining known bugs. Each day, the bar is being raised in terms of what is a big enough deal to warrant such a late change. Suess, meanwhile, sent his wife and kids to visit family in New York so he could work 18-hour days.

In an interview last week, Suess said he had been at work until 1 a.m. the night before and gets in every morning by 8 a.m., so he can chat with the folks in Beijing before they sign off for the night.

"If I am not online and pushing things along, then I am introducing delay," Suess said.

An admitted type-A personality, Suess is a stickler for organization--the kind of guy whose desk is always clean. (His wife would probably use the word "compulsive," Suess said.)

Suess said he hopes things will be enough under control that he can actually watch some of the games, particularly sailing, of which he is a big fan. "I sure hope so," he said. "When I got involved in this project, that was one of the reasons."

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.