Please, NBC, Use Hulu for Olympics Next Time!

Kevin Maney pleads: I've been thrilled this week to find every Olympic soccer match -- on demand, in its entirety -- on NBCOlympics.com. (Soccer starts before the opening ceremonies, to get all the games in.) This is truly a great step forward in Olympics coverage. Unable to watch the games live in the middle of the night, I watched the opening U.S. men's and women's games at my leisure.

But...

NBC is funneling all of its Olympics video through its NBCOlympics.com site, and that site is running on Microsoft's Internet video technology, Silverlight. So far, Silverlight is not up to the task. The two games I watched were riddled with jerky images, as if the data stream kept getting interrupted for a split second. The quality of the video, compared to Hulu and Joost, is so-so. You can't even get a full-screen view.

NBC, along with Fox, backed Hulu -- which is a far superior video experience than what I'm seeing on NBCOlympics. I e-mailed Hulu chief Jason Kilar to ask why NBC didn't use Hulu. "Short answer: the arrangement pre-dated us (Hulu)," he wrote back. Turns out he's in Beijing at the Games now -- hopefully prepping for the next Olympics. To NBC: Please use Hulu next time!

A side note: So far, the soccer matches on NBCOlympics are being shown with no audio commentary. The only sounds you hear are the crowd, the thunk of the ball when it's kicked, and occasionally the players' shouts. It's kind of eery. But after a while I started to like it. You can click and view a running text commentary -- by who knows who. In the US vs. Japan game, though, the text commentary was edgier and funnier than any broadcast TV soccer commentary I've ever heard. Once I got used to reading it, I started to like it.