I'm excited that the Olympics are coming up and thrilled that NBC is going to have thousands of hours of additional video footage available on its Web site NBC Olympics.com, but highly bummed that I can't watch it on my Mac! Apparently you need Microsoft Silverlight, which is only available on Windows systems?

Dave's Answer:

I don't know where you're getting your information from, but you can indeed watch those wonderful Olympic videos on your Macintosh -- I have been doing so myself -- because Microsoft has a late beta release of Silverlight for the Mac OS X platform.

Further, my experience was that with only one small glitch my browser stepped me neatly through the process of downloading and installing Silverlight so that I could jump right into the video stream without any fuss.

Here's how it worked for me running Flock, a variant on Firefox for the Mac platform (Flock adds some neat social networking features). First off, when I went to the site and requested a video, I saw this:

I dutifully choose "Click to Install" and then was told what would happen after I finished the install (F5? Am I on a PC?):



Moments later the download started and I saw the usual Firefox/Flock warning and query about what action to take in this situation:



I opted to save the DMG (disk image) file on my Desktop.

Here's where the only glitch I encountered occurred: once it finished downloading, nothing happened. I had to find the Silverlight disk image file:



Then double-click it to get a disk image actually to appear on the desktop. Once I did that, I opened it and saw the installar package:



Another double-click to get that going and Mac OS X asks if I'm really sure I trust this application from Microsoft:



Pretty much I do, so I click "Continue" and then step through the usual windows, dialog boxes and confirmations for a software install on the Mac. Interestingly, you can see that Microsoft hasn't yet finished polishing the install by the fact that they've chosen a typeface that's too big for the progress dialog:



I admit, no-one else in the world probably cares that "In" shouldn't be on the second line, and it's really not a big deal at all. In fact, the plug-in installs even with that typographic gaffe (go figure!)

After a moment the browser reloaded the video window on NBC Olympics and I was watching very nice quality streaming video in my browser:



Note that the video frame I've captured is from American track star Tyson Gay stumbling and falling on the 200-meter quarterfinal qualifying race. From waht I could see, something flew off his sneaker which caused him to stumble and crash on the first turn, pulling his hamstring. A terrible thing to happen!

I hope this will help you get Silverlight up and running on your own Mac so you too can enjoy the Olympic coverage.

Tip: if your browser somehow doesn't work with the "Click to Install" button shown earlier, you can also download Microsoft Silverlight for Mac OS X directly from VersionTracker: Download Silverlight for Mac OS X.

Comments

About the Author:
Dave Taylor is known as an expert on both business and technology issues. Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four startups, he also runs a marketing company and consults with firms seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

AskDaveTaylor.com
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/