As per the above link, Sam Ruby recently pointed to an announcement from S. Somasegar which stated,
We have signed an agreement to partner with NBC Universal to build a Silverlight 2.0 based web broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympic games. This agreement also sets MSN as the official home of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
At first I didn’t get what should have been Sam’s obvious point (he attached the Moonlight logo (in SVG format, none-the-less, which for those running IE would be unable to view… That Sam Ruby, I tell ya… always the sly one ;-)) inline to the post), something he clarified in a follow-up to my follow-up,
providing a useful service that the rest of us can benefit from
Define “us”. Does it include me?
Of course “me” links to http://www.unbuntu.com, suggesting in no uncertain terms the question,
Is “Silverlight” += “Moonlight” the same thing as,
… a Silverlight 2.0 based web broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympic games
Or in other words, will I be able to gain access to those same streams regardless of whether I am running Silverlight on Windows or Moonlight on [choose your favorite Linux distro.]?
My assumption is yes, but as Sam points out in another follow-up to my follow-up,
it seems you are suggesting that this same content will not be available to those running Moonlight.The announcement doesn’t say…
Anyone in the know care to clarify?
My hand-crafted mock-up of the Moonlight icon is "exclusive" to every browser that implements a standard that was published in 2000. As an end user, I'm pretty confident that you can find such a browser.
What are the chances that someone with a iPhone will be able to watch the "exclusive" web broadcast of the 2008 Olympic games? As an end user, what would you have to depend on happening in order to have this in place by August?
@Sam,
>> My hand-crafted mock-up of the Moonlight icon is "exclusive" to every browser that implements a standard that was published in 2000. > As an end user, I'm pretty confident that you can find such a browser. > What are the chances that someone with a iPhone will be able to watch the "exclusive" web broadcast of the 2008 Olympic games? > As an end user, what would you have to depend on happening in order to have this in place by August?
Sam,
If the iPhone opens its entire development stack (how and to what extent it will be opened up, is still up in the air) it should be possible to port Moonlight to it (although it probably would be easier for MS to support as its probably just a recompile away for them.
But I never thought of the iPhone as a beacon of open standards. Seems like an odd sample to pick to herald open standards. In fact, it seems that Apple has gone out of their way to keep its features locked:
* It renders YouTube through a special agreement with Google, avoiding the use of Flash or any other standard codecs.
* It has a new proprietary and closed protocol to communicate with the device so no music syncing is possible from non-iTunes providers.
* Strong lock into iTunes and iTunes related features. Its hard to even find a more closed ecosystem than that (particularly painful since the device is very popular, and wont work with Linux).
Miguel.
Btw, if you *really* need Silverlight content on your iPhone, you can port Moonlight.
Some folks ported the engine to MacOS X (it took a couple of hours, tops). The only issue is implementing the plugin to Safari on the iPhone.
We have no plans on doing that (Novell) after all, we are a Linux vendor. But in the best FOSS tradition "we are taking patches".
Miguel.