Silverlight helps bring streaming video to Olympics Web site

big team, but they don't need to crank out millions of lines of code, according to Rechs. The video site isn't an enterprise-class project with lots of business logic; it's all web services on the back end.

Those personnel don't include those who are doing the video capture, satellite video distribution or image processing for the videos; that's done by NBC with a huge team in Beijing, said Rechs, and it's something NBC has obviously been doing for a long time. (Note that it's Microsoft and NBC, not MSNBC; the content is hosted by MSN, and distributed by NBC.) Nor does the "began in January" include the discussions about overall site design or advertising models; Schematic wasn't a party to that discussion.

One technical tidbit about the application's design:it has "application logic everywhere," Rechs said. With Silverlight, a lot more code runs on the browser; there's almost no server-side code powering the video. "There's a lot of stuff in the client rather than the server or data center," explained Rechs.

Rechs says he's genuinely impressed with Silverlight 2.0, even in its beta status. "That web demo on stage during the keynote was the real deal, no smoke and mirrors," he said. Silverlight's performance is great, he explained, with no clunkiness or jerkiness in video or animation.

Still, Silverlight is new, so the tools are different from what Schematic's developers are used to working with, such as Microsoft's Expression Suite; that does require some transition time. And, of course, it's still a beta version.

But, Rechs said, "You couldn't build something like this from scratch."