NBC jumps ship and switches from Silverlight to Flash

By on Sep 7, 2008 at 5:05 PM
Entertainment September 7, 2008

In a move stirring up some debate, NBC announced last week that it will stream it’s NFL football games this season using Flash video instead of the much ballyhooed Silverlight it used for the Olympics. The streaming service, marking the first time full-length NFL football games have been available in the US over the Internet, made its debut on Thursday during the NFL season opener between the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins. Besides the video feed, the streaming service also offers the ability to switch camera angles, view picture-in-picture playback, receive live statistics and interact with commentators in real time. If you haven’t gotten your fill of football and Flash this weekend, mosey on over and let us know what you think. Which looks better? The Silverlight version of Michael Phelps swimming for the gold or the Flash version of Brett Favre throwing his first post-unretirement pass as a New York Jet?

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  • H4MM3R

    Silverlight! :)

  • josh

    umm… the one that runs on my mac :-)

  • smokeonit

    both suck big time!!!

    just use quicktime and be over with, LOL;-)

  • Mike

    So much for the MS in MSNBC?

  • Tommy

    Quicktime? I hope that was a joke…

  • dave pp

    Well at least Quicktime is truly cross platform and doesn’t cry when you use and older WIN or MAC.

  • bob

    Finally! Silverlight sucks! I went to NBC to watch some olympic coverage and they told me I needed silverlight (I use linux, don’t know/care if they make a version for linux). Anyway, I left their site and headed over to youtube and watched what I wanted.

  • TonyB

    The Olympics stuff in silverlight was sweet.

    Silverlight rocks.

    Quicktime is a joke, who wants that crap on their computer.

    Silverlight runs on PC, Mac, and linux (via Moonlight).

  • Galvatron

    qick tim you mena that thing thats laced with DRM an even gives OSX problems besides whao gives a crap about NBC they suck anyways

  • Benjamin Fulghum

    The exact reason I quit using Linux and a Mac, Too much stuff I use wont work on it, like Firefox, so back to MS…and the olympics on Silverlight looked awsome, far better than Flash.

  • dan

    Silverlight is much better. Cleaner and clearer picture plus streams much better. No glitches even on slower machines. I hate the start and stop on older machines that happens with flash. Silverlight is more compressed and easier to stream and allows for higher quality. MS actually got it right this time. And there is a side project for tux. Unless the next flash can match it or MS refuses to make silverlight cross platform there is no reason to believe it won’t begin to dominate the market. Especially in HD which flash absolutly sucks at

  • Gun in Mouth

    Is there anyway we can get BGR to install an intelligence filter on the “Submit Comment” button? This way we can keep the blithering two-bit retards like Galvatron from ever being heard from again? I mean OMG is there anything intelligent or, let me rephrase… remotely decipherable that comes out of your kindergarten dropout brain of yours? You have no idea what you ever speak of, and I for one, am quickly tiring of horsesh$t that you type. P.S. Send me your address, I am going to mail you $14.99 for a dictionary so maybe for once you could have all of your words spelled correctly. Oh hell.. what am I thinking, you can’t even read…

  • Jeremiah

    Why do people keep bringing up Quicktime? We’re talking about Flash or Silverlight!

    Btw, I actually had a few problems with Silverlight. It was VERY reluctant to start in the middle, and it would sometimes even restart from the beginning (don’t get me started about how sick I was of the Beijing 2008 startup graphics). Occasionally, it wouldn’t go up to full clarity even though I did have the connection.

    Still, when it was fully up and running, it was pretty sweet. Flash though I think is more stable. I guess we’ll see!

  • Stephen

    There was no jumping ship.

    Microsoft made an agreement with NBC to test out Silverlight with the Olympics. The test was deemed a success. They never planned to do NFL broadcasts in anything but Flash….

  • Magius

    Indeed, for an up and coming product I was impressed by what Silverlight did. Anyone know if there are any experienced Flash devs in the SL team?

  • Brad

    I agree with Jeremiah that QT isn’t in the same category as Silverlight or Flash. Not to mention it’s tendency to be buggy on any other platform than Mac. I used to be a QT proponent. Not anymore.
    I would like to see Silverlight compete in this market and not get marginalized. Its presence has already pushed Adobe to improve upon the Flash player. Competition is healthy and drives innovation.

  • HumphreyBogus
  • Justin

    Just get rid of IE and use the now web standard tag :)

    IE sucks and Silverlight is MS’s answer to web-standards so therefore it sucks too.

  • Justin

    sorry… I guess it filtered out <video>

  • http://NA Justin Chandler

    I’m really tired of the jerkoffs taking paychecks to post false blog and forum comments. Anyone who has really used it knows that Silverlight sucks nut sacks. On the XBox360 it does fine, but on pretty much every computer I’ve used it on [including my wicked fast quad core overclocked Phenom-based system with 3GB of DDR2 RAM and NLited XP. It’s also got a 512MB 4350 PCI express video card in it, despite the already powerful AMD760-based integraded GPU. Silverlight images are grainy and the sound is anything but clear. I cancelled Netflix because of Silverlight, and now stream from other sites like Hulu that use flash — on my 40in 1080p LCD. It’s fantastic. And although I didn’t watch the olympics online, I have read a lot of reviews of the content and the huge majority were displeased with the performance.

  • http://NA Justin Chandler

    Incidentally, it’s funny how after the decision was made by NBC to stop using Silverlight [due to the bad press it received], all the Microsoft fan-boys started sugar-coating saying, “Oh NBC never said they would use Silverlight for NFL, blahblahblah” It’s truly hilarious. Look, I manage a datacenter with Petabytes of data streaming though a huge range of hardware running most any flavor of OS: SunOS, Solaris, HPUX, CentOS, RHEL, Slackware, NT4, NT5/2000, 2003, and 2008 and more. Out of all the operating systems used in my datacenter, I love Windows the most. With the possible exception of Unix, it’s easier to configure, more stable, and requires a great deal less downtime in emergencies. I love most of Microsoft’s stuff — but the simple fact is that SILVERLIGHT BLOWS MEXICAN DONKEY BALLS.

  • bob a

    silverlight sucks. too bad Netflix fell for that crap

  • Ray D

    Silverlight won’t run on any of my 5 computers. Everytime you open up an application (video) you get the message “Install Silverlight” (inspite of it already having been installed). In order to view a video in Silverlight, I have to uninstall Silverlight, re-install it and then view the video. To watch another video, I have to uninstall silverlight and then re-install it. this goes over and over and over.

  • cs

    Ray D, lol, same here.

    Some sites show “Install Silverlight” althoug I’ve already got one.

    And I have never managed to play video with Silverlight (maybe coz low bandwidth ).

    Also, went to Microsoft’s official “showcase” site, all examples are so lame, laggy, inconvenient and unpleasant to work with that I wanted to commit suicide

    Flash is far much better, although I actually don’t care for both of them. Static html is far much better.

  • i laugh at silverlight and c#

    I laugh at Micro$cam’s attempt to produce competitors to everything that has almost 100% market share at some point in time. C# = attempt to copy Java. No one cares about Java anymore(entirely different story) so C# is doomed. Silverlight vs Flash. Pee-Wee Herman vs Mike Tyson in his prime. Kind of obvious here. Derp derp.

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