Is it me or does NBC simply not get the whole online thing?
Micand: In Canada, CTV offered access to both live video and recorded clips for these Olympics. On Windows, the service seemed to work seamlessly -- it did not prompt for cable providers, e-mail addresses, or any such thing. On Linux, the experience was less smooth. As the video relied on Silverlight, I had to install Moonlight. Through the first day or two of the Games, only the stable v2.0 was clearly offered on the Moonlight Web site, which did not support video from CTV or NBC (and which had the unfortunate habit of ballooning a freshly-launched Firefox to more than a gigabyte of memory usage). Later on, the v3.0 preview, which does support video, was prominently offered on the Moonlight site. Sadly, it performed poorly -- video ran at only about 5 FPS on my system, while consuming an entire CPU core.In contrast, CBC handled Canadian coverage of the Beijing Games in 2008. All their video was offered via Flash, which worked splendidly in Linux. Almost every event was viewable, often without commercials and commentators. I am saddened by this backward step.