Silverlight and Sunday night football

My fascination with Silverlight

Is not strongly determined by the video aspects, though they can be the most immediately compelling.  That said, it is certainly an indicator of the impacted Silverlight is having, that Silverlight was chosen for the online Olympics experience, the online presidential inauguration, and now for the entire season of Sunday night football.

It was announced today that  The NFL and NBC will be delivering the entire Sunday Night Football season utilizing Silverlight 3.0 and IIS Smooth Streaming and that the first game of the opening season will be broadcast tonight with the Tennessee Titans vs. Pittsburg Steelers game starting at 5:30pm PST and can be viewed online for free:

There’s no way to escape that this is a pretty big deal, and it includes a host of extraordinary features including:

· A full screen video player that is capable of delivering 720p HD video.

· A main HD video feed, plus 4 user selectable alternate synchronized camera feeds that allows users to switch camera angles themselves.

· Adaptive smooth streaming of live HD video, which enables the video player to automatically switch bitrates on the fly depending on networking/CPU conditions.

· DVR support of the live video, including Pause, Instant Replay, Slow Motion, Skip Forward/Back

· Play-by-play data (touchdowns, fumbles, etc) inserted as tooltip chapter markers on the scrubber at the bottom allowing you to quickly seek to key moments.

· Highlights of major plays created within minutes of the play.

· Live stats in real-time

· live chat with the TV broadcasters