Silverlight + NBC Olympics + Microsoft = Farce!

I haven't blogged for a while so I guess a bit of a whine, some bitching and some ranting wouldn't be a bad way to get back into it.

Silverlight
It's piece of technology I can't seem to get excited about at all. Despite having been introduced to it in Teched last year, it failed to generate in me the required level of excitement. I maintained that it was simply Microsoft trying to mimick Flash (Silverlight vs. Flash: The Developer Story). I guess it's a bit more then that, but like most other things, it's the usual Microsoft's late arrival to the party. An arrival none to be thrilled about. Several previous attempts at getting Silverlight to work on both Firefox and IE failed miserably. It just didn't work on my Firefox 3 instance and managed to crash IE and hang my system. To date, the user experience with the Flash plugins have been painless and extremely bad with Silverlight. So it's Flash 1, Silverlight 0.

NBC Olympics
After 11 days have passed (apparently) I finally got excited about the olympics today and decided to bring myself up to date with all the goings on. So I read a bunch of news articles and figured it'd be best to digest them all with some audio visual matter. I discovered the nbcolympics.com thanks to the Microsoft website. Upon visiting the site, I was presented with a pop up to download Silverlight in order to experience the videos. I decided to give in and finally download the 4mb+ Silverlight upgrade package. 4MB! That in itself is a problem. It's HUGE!

In anycase, downloaded, installed and ready for action, I restarted the browser and settled in for some Olympics action I've been missing for 11 days now. I quickly discovered that the only thing Sliverlight was being used for on the site were the videos. I selected a video and it asked me to chose a postcode and a broadcaster near me. I presumed this was just the formality to capture some details about the user. Being in Fiji, I duly selected my postcode to be America's favourite 90210 and some random broadcaster. Clicked ok and what do you get?

"We're Sorry. NBC is required to restrict this video to viewers within the United States. Additional information about the error: We're Sorry. NBC is required to restrict this video to viewers within the United States."

What a lame fucking experience! Why the hell didn't they say that before making me do all that! I guess I should've known, but that's no excuse for telling me at the point when I've done all the hard work. NBCOlympics.com developers must be some of the lamest bunch on earth. If they figured I wasn't from the US at the point just before showing me the video, they could have popped up a message earlier saying I couldn't access the darned olympics videos. Heck they could've just silently dropped all references to viewing the video for non US based visitors to their site. I would've gone somewhere else. It would've saved me time. This is typical Microsoft deception. It's quite clear they were trying to push Silverlight through the site, but deceiving me and leaving me high and dry isn't going to get me any more excited about their copy cat product!

Now that that's out of my system, let me say that I am not the only one unhappy about NBOlympics.com. This post on Techcrunch.com is one of those, but all for different reasons. Reading through some of the comments on that post, the die-hard Microsofties were quick to defend NBC and the Silverlight platform. Other commentators were quick to point out Flash as the better alternative. I whole heartedly agree with them. 

I wish Silverlight all the luck. They will certainly need a lot of work convince the developer in me.