Like Michael Phelps, Microsoft is chasing gold at the Olympics. With its Silverlight rich Internet application technology, Microsoft is helping NBC break records in online viewership.

Michael Phelps is not the only one breaking records and winning gold at the Olympics in Beijing.

If Microsoft’s Silverlight continues to have the success it has had in streaming video coverage of the Olympic Games around the world, it could mean gold for Microsoft as the software giant continues its competition with Adobe and that company’s ubiquitous Flash technology.

Adobe claims that up to 75 percent or more of the video on the Internet uses Flash. The company also claims a huge number of Flash downloads a day. In a recent interview with eWEEK, Adrian Ludwig, group manager of product marketing in the Adobe Platform and Developer Business Unit, said Adobe sees 10 million downloads of Flash each day. However, with the Olympics and the deal Microsoft has with NBC to stream the coverage, Microsoft officials said Silverlight has been downloaded up to 8 million times a day over the last several days.

"You have to look at things like the development perspective and what this all means for developers, and how this changes the game," said Brian Goldfarb, group product manager of Microsoft’s Developer Division. "We’ve provided competition in a market that desperately needed competition."

Goldfarb also noted, "from a Silverlight perspective, this is an amazing opportunity to demonstrate what’s possible with the technology. This puts a stake in the ground and [is] saying we’re here. This may be the single biggest online event and Microsoft is empowering it."

And the 2008 Olympic Games are smashing old online records set for the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. In the first four days of events, NBCOlympics.com surpassed the totals for the entire Athens Games in page views, video streams and unique users.

Here are the stats through first four days of the Beijing games compared with entire Athens games. There were 13.5 million video streams for the Beijing games, versus 2.2 million for the entire Athens games—a difference of 514 percent. Through the first four days there were 16.9 million unique users for the Beijing games, versus 11.1 million for the entire Athens games. And regarding page views, there were 291.1 million for Beijing versus 229.9 million for the entire Athens games.

NBC and Microsoft are enabling viewers to watch more than 3,500 hours of Olympics coverage, with nearly 3,000 hours of live coverage being made available, Microsoft officials said.

Moreover, Goldfarb said, on Aug. 11, for instance, 250TB of data was delivered via Silverlight.

"When you think about the size and scope of all this it’s kind of mind-boggling," he said.

Some have mentioned that Microsoft’s Silverlight strategy could conjure up vestiges of past antitrust issues. To this Goldfarb simply said, "The key thing here is this is the first time people have had competition." Indeed, Ludwig noted that Flash’s penetration may be as high as 98 percent of all PCs. Goldfarb presents Silverlight as an opportunity for developers and designers.

Goldfarb also noted that developers can use Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Express tools to create Silverlight applications. "And it’s not just for .NET developers," Goldfarb said, noting that Microsoft is working with Novell to deliver a Linux version of Silverlight known as Moonlight.