Olympic Web Video For Some, Not All

I love the Olympic Games. Its so great to be able to watch the best athletes in the world competing in events that some of which you rarely get the opportunity to see. Because of my professional and personal schedule I haven't had the chance to see as much as I'd like, so I've used my DVR to record as much as my hard drive will hold (not much when recording in HD). As an alternative I naturally turned to the web, thinking - like everything else - there must be ample clips available online to watch at will. This turned out to not really be the case.

After some brief searching, I discovered that NBC owns the rights to all Olympic content in the US. While YouTube/Google Video is providing web video to other countries of the Olympics, this is not allowed in the US. Because of this, I learned that as quickly as users where uploading their favorite clips, they were being removed.

So left with no other options than the NBC Olympics website, I figured what the heck I'll check some of these videos out. To my surprise, the videos where not in Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media, or even Real. The videos are only viewable with the Microsoft SILVERLIGHT plugin.

I do not have the silverlight plugin - and I do not want it. However I am lucky enough to be able to install it if I want. Others are not so lucky. Silverlight does not run on any Linux system, or all Apple iBooks and PowerBooks as well as some iMacs and Mac minis.

I feel that even by deciding to go with Microsoft's Silverlight technology to power NBCOlympics.com they still should have offered some option for all users to watch Olympic clips. I think this could have been the largest middle finger for NBC to give a huge amount of users. Who is thinking about accessibility there? Usability of the content that they offer? And what ad dollars they could be getting with and even larger viewing audience? We would never do that to our clients.. I'm just surprised they would do it to theirs.