Update: More information can be found in this blog entry (look towards mid-November 2008).
Coordinated with the Seattle Code Camp I'm presenting at, there was a nerd dinner held last night. It was a really good time. I was able to get Adam Kinney on record saying that Silverlight 2 will be released in the summer of 2008. Adam also informed me that the name is changing (or has already changed) from Silverlight 2.0 (pronounced "Silverlight two dot oh") to Silverlight 2 (pronounced "Silverlight two"). I asked Adam how this would impact the NBC Olympics site which will be using Silverlight (details) and he didn't know if that site was even going to be built on Silverlight 2.
That brings up a good point. Many "big" sites out there already use Silverlight 1.0 to deliver video content (see http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight for examples). The Olympics site doesn't need to wait for Silverlight 2 to be released. The technology necessary to fill their needs is already here.
Here's a random thought. If I'm spending all of my time talking only about the technology of the Olympics web site then I must be a super-geek with absolutely no life. What I need to be talking about is the fact that my mom and other family members who love the Olympics can now watch whatever contests they want and are not limited to only what the networks decided to show. That's HUGE. Mom, here's the link to that web site, http://www.nbcolympics.com/. Here's some info about the quanity of video you'll finally be able to choose from. Now this is something to look forward to!
- 2,200 hours of live event video coverage, with more than 20 simultaneous live video streams at peak times
- More than 3,000 hours of on-demand video content including full-event replays, highlights, features, interviews and encore packages.