The 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China this summer will be broadcast on the Web using Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 technology, a Microsoft official said in his blog on Monday. “We have signed an agreement to partner with NBC Universal to build a Silverlight 2.0-based Web broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympic games,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division in a blog entry.“As a part of this, we will provide users with exclusive access to over 3,000 hours of live and on-demand video content via Silverlight streaming. This means that viewers can access every minute of every event,” he said. Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in technology was unveiled last year and is widely viewed as a competitor to the Adobe Flash multimedia platform for the Web. But Microsoft has not announced a release date for Silverlight 2.0, which features a subset of Microsoft’s .Net Framework programming model. A beta release of version 2.0 is due early this year. “It is exciting to see Silverlight be the catalyst to turn ‘NBCOlympics.com on MSN’ into a groundbreaking site and video experience that will redefine sports content online and in some small way we can be part of this historic event,” Somasegar said. Software Development