Flex Pasta

NBC Olympics with Silverlight?

How many of you logged on to nbcolympics.com to see the footage?  I know I did, and at first I did cringe at the fact I had to download Silverlight to see the videos!  First I wonder how Silverlight became a partner with NBC.  From Microsofts standpoint it is great exposure to get Silverlight on a lot of computers quickly. Only the videos are using Silverlight, the rest of the site is just HTML.  I would like to make two comments about the site and would like to hear your feedback as well.

1) I would like to have seen NBC do more with the Olympic site.  It is great to be able to search for video by country, athlete, sport, etc, but the interface was poor and sometimes bugy.  Silverlight isn’t advanced as Flex, so I am guessing that is why the searching is done with standard HTML.  Think of the possibilities with Flex on this screen:

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2) The Silverlight video player worked really nice!  I could quickly flip to any part of the video using the player bar and the video continued almost immeadiatly in the new location.  Will Silverlight become a serious competitor to Flex in the coming years?  Will Adobe try and challenge Silverlight on the .NET Framework?  Does Microsoft have an unfair advantage because they own the .NET and can easily integreate and market Silverlight better?  I don’t know the answer to this, but it will be interesting to see how it all plays out!