During Bill's keynote tonight at CES, he announced that NBC Universal, owner of the exclusive U.S. media rights to this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing, China (August 8-24, 2008), has teamed up with MSN and Microsoft in an unprecedented strategic alliance to create “NBCOlympics.com on MSN”, a next-generation online experience for Olympic fans across the United States. With thousands of hours of competition video in both live and on-demand formats, deep analysis and results delivered from NBC’s award-winning broadcast and digital media teams, and Microsoft’s Silverlight technology to deliver deeply immersive user experiences, NBCOlympics.com’s coverage will be powered by MSN and Microsoft technology to complement NBC’s broadcast programming and put millions of fans in control of the Olympic sports, athletes and countries they want to watch.

This is very cool. Not only will this allow people to view the Olympic Games as never before, but it will also accelerate the distribution of the Silverlight technology!  This has been the #1 issue for a new technology ... looks (and really is) cool but no one wants to be the first one to use it. This resolves the issue of wide scale distribution. I know from past (in dealing with Olympic content) that this will attract users and they will not hesitate to do a one-time download and install of a small browser plug-in (assuming they don't already have it).

And this isn't limited to just IE users ... Silverlight works cross platform and cross browser. If you haven't checked out Silverlight yet, I suggest you take a moment and do so. And if you have already built a Silverlight app, you should upload it to the Silverlight Showcase for others to checkout.

If you didn't get a chance to see our Holiday greeting (which uses Silverlight), you should.

Now back to the show ... I need to check out the OLED TVs!