The 2008 Summer Olympics are well underway. And, you can watch video clips as well as live streams on your Mac or iPhone (or iPod touch) if you know what to do.
Mac OS X
If you want to watch the Olympics on your Mac on the NBCOlympics.com website (in the U.S.), you can use either Safari or Firefox. You'll be prompted with the Click To Install the Free Plugin message (see the example here) to install Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight provides a cross-platform (Windows and Mac OS X) rich internet application platform that allows audio and video streaming up to 720p (the low end of High Definition). Version 1.0 has been available since September 2007. Version 2 Beta 2 is the current version in common use despite its beta release status.
Once you install Silverlight on your Mac, you can watch videos by clicking the Play Video button on the NBCOlympics website. And, don't neglect to check the small tabbed boxes under the initial video playback frame. The context sensitive tabs provides more information about the specific video you are watching.
Keep an eye on the All Sports sidebar on the left side of the main NBCOlympics window. If you see a small red box with the word Live in it, it means that there is a live video stream available for that particular sport. Because of the time difference between the U.S. and China, this is not see during what we (in the U.S.) consider prime time. So, do the timezone math: China is UTC+8 (that's the whole country, btw, despite its enormous geographic size).
If you enlarge the video window and choose Live Control Room, you can choose to watch up to 4 video feed simultaneously. Truly, Olympic information overload.
You can find more information about Microsoft Silverlight at:
The Official Microsoft Silverlight Site
iPhone or iPod touch
Despite what you may have ready elsewhere, you can, in fact, watch NBCOlympics.com video on your iPhone or iPod touch even though Silverlight is not availble for the iPhone. All you need to do is select a video to watch and Quicktime fires up to display it. You do not need to make any configuration change or add an app. You can see screen captures of both the NBCOlympics.com mobile web site as well as a video playback view from my iPod touch here. Point your iPhone Safari browser to...
...to watch the 2008 Summer Olympics while one the move.
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thank you for this post.
thank you for this post.
Gabriel Smith: It is not correct to say that "any platform" can be used to view the Olympics on NBCOlymopics.com since it requires Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 which specifically runs on Microsoft Mac OS X (only Intel processors, not PowerPC) and Windows 2000 or newer (not Me, 98SE, NT, etc.). Silverlight does not run on any of the *nix-es (e.g., Linux). I happen to be using a Fedora Linux workstation this morning and can verify that.
Just to clarify the misleading title.....you can use any platform to view the Olympics through the NBC website. Sorry mac users...your elitist proprietary system does not expand beyond your little universe of pretty buttons.
Kate: Ack! My old 1st gen Mac mini (with a G4) died last year. So, I don't have any PowerPC based Mac to test on anymore. After reading your comment I did some checking and found that while the older Silverlight 1.0 supported PPC Macs, the new 2.0 Beta 2 needed for NBCOlympics.com does not.
From what I can tell, nbc olympics website only supports Macs with Intel dual processors. Is there something I'm missing, or another way to watch on a Mac that doesn't have an Intel processor?