NBC's Olympics website takes the silver; apt that it forced SILVERlight down our throats

Two reports suggest that NBCOlympics.com -- like a certain French relay swimmer -- fell victim to its own hype. And just like the wobbly launch of MSNBC all those years ago, Microsoft is partly to blame.

An Nielsen online study, relayed by Silicon Alley Insider, finds that NBCOlympics is finishing a distant second to Yahoo's Olympics page. Another report from eMarketer finds that NBCOlympics' video site earned a pitiful $5.75 million in revenue.

Seems that for all the traffic NBCOlympic was generating, relatively few of those visits were for web video. The reason, eMarketer says, is that people "had to download Microsoft Silverlight technology to view videos, an additional step that turned off many visitors." It almost turned me, off: Even after installing Silverlight, my Mac acted all dumb until I rebooted it and stood over it while doing the Usain Bolt stance.

Plus, as people commenting on this site have noted, NBC squandered a huge opportunity by not streaming a number of key Olympic events live (such as the men's 4x100 relay featuring the aforementioned Bolt of Lightning).

So in the end, it came down to a couple of 19th-century technologies: typing and snapshots. "NBC, obviously, has the exclusive rights to Olympic video. But anyone can write about the Olympics," notes SAI. And it was text and pictures, not shiny hi-res video, that people came to look at whether visiting NBC's site or anyone else's.