Bing and the Winter Olympics

Microsoft is again partnering with NBC Universal to deliver live Olympics coverage. On the NBCOlympics.com website, over 400 hours of live competition will be made available for all 15 of the Winter Olympics sports. In addition, you’ll have access to 1000 hours of full-event replays, recaps, montages, commentator analysis, and athlete-specific clips.

As with the previous Olympics games, the video will be streamed in HD via Microsoft Silverlight technology and will feature DVR-like controls for pausing and rewinding the live coverage.

Other new features include Silverlight Enhanced HD photo galleries on NBCOlympics.com where you can zoom in and out of your favorite images and a social “Olympic Pulse” page that will feature athlete and expert tweets and blog posts.

This year, however, Bing is getting in on the action too. You can visually explore Vancouver through Bing’s interactive StreetSide Maps, the Bing homepage will feature Olympic-related images, Bing Visual Search will add an “Olympic Athletes” category, and new Instant Answers will be added daily on popular athletes, sporting events and medal counts. In addition, Bing has exclusive rights to index all the Winter Games videos.

Although the games haven’t started yet, you can visit NBCOlympics.com for related news, images, and videos.