Back in the latter half of June, I asked a fairly simple question concerning NBC’s Olympic foray on the Web: Will costs outweigh rewards? I imagined that the broadcaster might have to apply red tape to its cost-profit report. Perhaps a whole lot of it, even, particularly given the sheer volume of live and on-demand coverage promised to potential Web viewers. That being said, there’s a number now being floated by eMarketer concerning NBC’s in-video advertising that seems remarkably small. A $5.75 million kind of small.

A report in today’s Wall Street Journal by Emily Steel references eMarketer’s estimate on advertisement revenue to be tallied once all is played through and Beijing sends the last of its international guestlist back to their respective places of origin. The Internet researcher appears to lay some of the blame on NBC’s strict delivery deal with Microsoft and the Silverlight plugin requirement. A number of participants in a Mashable poll made known their aversion to the plugin, so eMarketer’s assessment could very well be accurate.

The Wall Street Journal notes that NBCOlympics.com users’ inability to view and share content across various external sites would limit the audience NBC might otherwise have attained. In fact, this clash of interests among NBC and Web users proved to be a notable issue, particularly in the area of YouTube, where a race to take down footage of Olympic games before they were broadcast in delayed-release on NBC stations drew the attention of the blogosphere as well as the mainstream press.

A sports advertising benchmark cited by the WSJ for the world of Web-streaming video was CBS’s ability to garner some $23 million in total revenue throughout the three-week-long NCAA March Madness college basketball tournament. Do watch for the key words “total revenue,” however. The presentation of in-video advertisements is only one part of the picture at NBCOlympics.com. (Albeit a sensibly important aspect of the entire portrait.)

The thing is, if CBS and NBC were to juxtapose viewerships, one would still see eMarketer’s premonition as somewhat unfortunate. CBS offered a figure of 4.8 million viewers. NBC, meanwhile, claimed to have nearly as much in its opening day, with 4.2m. And just this past Wednesday it issued a figure to the tune of 6.2m unique users.

We’ll certainly have to wait until events complete wrap up to offer a definitive take on the effect NBC Olympics has had. While I have voiced some negatives about NBC’s online delivery of events, I think my initial impression - that the deal will be seen as an aid for the company - will be realized in the weeks ahead. Though maybe just barely.

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The volume of video coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics provided by NBC this year is unprecedented. The delivery of visual fodder for athletics fans will, when all is said and done, run thousands of hours in aggregate. Already, a good amount of on-demand and live streaming options have been made available. And while some content has proliferated in non-officially-sanctioned places, too, according to The New York Times, NBC is already touting a page view count of 70 million for the big “08/08/08.” That’s up from a 20 million peak in 2004. NBC says that this year’s opener translates to 4.2 million unique users, or an increase of nearly 500% from four years prior.

Of course, NBC is not along in making a splash on the Web. Microsoft is as well. Earlier this year it announced having signed a deal to provide its Silverlight video utility as the exclusive mechanism for viewers to employ when watching events at NBCOlympics.com. So now that the games have commenced, we put a few questions to you: Did the NBC-Microsoft play convince you to download Silverlight 2.0, if you hadn’t already done so? What’s your experience? Does it match or exceed your experiences with the latest Flash iteration? Furthermore, will Microsoft’s Olympic arrangement propel its cross-platform plugin far into the mainstream in the sense of being a permanent challenger to Adobe?

What’s your take on Silverlight’s post-Olympic future? ( polls)

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Google today announced that its DoubleClick platform would now start serving ads on Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 platform and NBCOlympics.com will be the first to open its arms for DoubleClick’s In-Stream advertising service on Silverlight 2.

“Microsoft has always had a strong commitment to working closely with partners and the industry to enable them to leverage our tools and platform to deliver great user experiences. With Silverlight, we’ve extended that commitment to the advertising space,” said Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Division. “We’re pleased to see the investment DoubleClick has made to enable customers such as NBCOlympics.com to take advantage of Silverlight to offer compelling packages to their advertisers.”

Nice try, Scott. I know it’s difficult to admit and sometimes it’s easier to pretend like you’re happy with a deal even when you’re not, but doesn’t it hurt just a little to know that Google is the leader in the Silverlight advertising space before your company has even scratched the surface?

What happened to that Microsoft advertising platform we’ve all been waiting for? Surely it would make some sense to take control of the Silverlight advertising space in a big way, wouldn’t it?

Once again, Google has pulled the wool over Microsoft’s eyes and the company is in the dark, circling around, wondering how in the world it’ll be able to beat Google on something, anything.

Silverlight is a Microsoft product. Allow me to reiterate, Silverlight is a Microsoft product. Realizing that, Microsoft watches Google form advertising deals on its own platform and then releases a statement in the Google press release saying that it’s happy to see DoubleClick has made an “investment” in Silverlight? What a joke.

If this isn’t the catalyst Microsoft needs, I don’t know what is. It’s not only being boxed out of the advertising space all over the Web, but now it’s being boxed out of advertising on its own platform without even harnessing its power to fight back.

At this point, the lead Google has over Microsoft is laughable. Not only does it kill the company in search, but also it kills Microsoft in advertising, and now it’s killing the software giant on its own platform.

I realize Microsoft is trying to advertise through Silverlight, but if nothing else, this latest announcement makes me wonder if Microsoft either doesn’t have the motivation Google does or if it simply doesn’t have the product. My guess is the latter.

Microsoft’s very own platform is already being hijacked by its biggest competitor and it better move fast if it doesn’t want to be pushed out of that advertising space too.

Not bad, Google. Not bad.

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Socialmedian, a social news site that we’ve tracked the progress of over the past few months, is now open to everyone.

While a lot of the bases have been covered in our previous coverage, give Socialmedian credit for a nicely paced launch and responsiveness to its alpha users. Today’s public launch includes 350 “user-generated features” as founder Jason Goldberg likes to call them, and the site already has more than 1,000 daily active users – not too shabby considering that until now the service has been invite-only in the hyper-competitive social news space.

The ongoing enhancements and relatively active community were very visible in a tour of the site that Goldberg gave me yesterday. A lot of the ideas behind the service are very familiar if you use products like Digg, Friendfeed, and Google Reader.

You can follow different topical news groups – which are a collection of activities from people interested in the same topic (called News Networks) - or subscribe to updates from other users (called Newsmakers). On your homepage, you can then filter between the activities in your News Networks and the activities among the Newsmakers you’re tracking. Activities tracked include “Clipping” a story (akin to Digg with bookmarklet and all) or commenting on something on Socialmedian.

Looking beyond those features – which on the surface seem like a hybrid of Digg and Friendfeed – is where Socialmedian potentially gets very interesting for news junkies, and it comes in the form of providing feedback to the service. You can vote on each story’s relevance, rank topics in the order of importance to you, and upgrade the frequency at which you’d like to see stories from specific sources. So, hypothetically, if you want to customize Socialmedian to show you more stories about social networking, from Mashable, you can do just that

Beyond these features are where I draw the analogy to Google Reader. The “sharing” options associated with each item on Socialmedian allow you to either email it, Tweet it, or perhaps most interestingly – share it with one of your News Networks. Additionally, you can send a “Snip” (akin to a Note in Google Reader) to your networks.

If that’s not exhaustive enough, Socialmedian also acts as a profile aggregator, using the Google Social Graph API to pull in your profiles from various networks. While right now, this only leads to your profile displaying links, eventually it will turn Socialmedian profiles into yet another lifestreaming aggregator, but with a focus squarely on news according to Goldberg.

In addition to opening up its door to everyone, Socialmedian – which to-date has consisted of Goldberg and a team of programmers in India - is also for the first time disclosing its list of investors. Among the high profile people and organizations backing the company to the tune of $600,000 so far are WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt.

Clearly, Socialmedian has been paying attention to a lot of the trends in social news and aggregation in readying its public launch. It’s an impressive effort, but if there is one big drawback, it’s that the site does require a big investment from the user. Versus sites like Digg where you can passively browse the top content in your preferred high-level categories, to really get the most out of Socialmedian, you need to be active in the form of following other users, joining different News Networks, and continually using the feedback loops that the service provides. On the other hand, that investment might be well worth it for those that are drowning in information overload.

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Source:Mashable!

UK residents have lived under the watchful eye of cameras for a while now, but still Google’s Street View initiative, an effort to photograph roadways and any structures adjacent to the tarmac, both east and west of the Atlantic, was required to undergo examination by the Information Commissioner after hearing from worried citizen rights watchdogs at Privacy International. Today it is said that the IC is officially satisfied with measures promised by Google to protect privacy and safety (blurring of faces of passersby, vehicular license plates, and image removal), and the company has been allowed to proceed as planned.

According to BBC News, the issue of privacy pertaining to roadway and streetside photography was first raised as a relatively high-profile concern earlier this month, when Google announced its intention to venture down lanes in a “few European countries.” The go-ahead given to Google ensures that it won’t be very long before the UK receives the same treatment many American cities have already.

The only resistance to Google Street View to be publicly reported in recent months, which in fact led to the complete removal of coverage for a specific area, was when the Minnesota community of North Oaks, a private jurisdiction, requested that it be removed when it was decided that Google had not gained the authorization to document it. Google complied.

Of course, any comparison with Google’s efforts and those of the UK government to surveil society, as I made a point to do in the introduction, must include mention that one project is privately managed while the other is government-led.

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Source:Mashable!

If you’ve been hearing about NBC’s efforts to deliver on-the-go video content from the Olympic Games next month, and would like to watch downloads through a Windows Vista Media Center machine, you’re in luck. NBC is now enabling its Olympics On the Go service for that very purpose.

The broadcaster previously announced a partnership with Wavexpress, the name behind TVTonic, in late June. NBC chose the service to provide downloadable media from the summer games for viewing on PCs in automated, DVR-like fashion. Now the two companies are making it possible to extend the on-demand experience further by enabling Vista Media Center users the ability to watch such content - whether on the desktop or from the comfort of a home entertainment center.

NBC is said to be providing “popular events” for download, such as: beach volleyball, swimming, gymnastics, basketball, etc. Video quality is purported to be “up-to-HD.”

If you’re not interested in arranging your schedule to make time for live video streams from the NBC Olympics page in August — Beijing time may be difficult for a U.S.-based audience to adapt to — but wish to keep abreast of goings on in and around the city in a timely way, NBC’s arrangement with Wavexpress and its IPTV-like TVTonic development is something to consider.

It is rather unfortunate, however, that TVTonic is offered exclusively as a Windows Vista Media Center option. This will presumably keep many viewers in the Web browser to watch the games.

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