So, I kind of snubbed nbc.com for the olympics for other available, non-silverlight sources, but I had read a (shockingly) good review of demconvention.com and its HD feed of the Democratic Convention on Gawker. Then I got to my New York apt and tried to find an over-the-air signal for my television and there was none, so I was getting panicky and really wanted to watch the DNC, so I said “okay, I’ll listen to gawker and try demconvention.com.”

Turns out the thing was Silverlight. I hate downloading plug-ins, makes me feel all 1998 n stuff. But i persevered and downloaded two plugins – one for Silverlight and one for Move Networks – and went for it.

OMG, it was amazing. I watched all manner of Democratic congressperson and soldier in amazing HD, streaming, in real time. And not only that, I was in awe of it’s auto-correction and bandwitdh optimization management. The stream would effortlessly switch from HD to standard resolution to low res, depending on bandwidth, and sometimes you could see both streams in the same frame. Really solid stuff. Color me impressed.

Day three, however, made me realize that it had some problems. I’m not sure whether the problems were with the fact that I was watching more pre-canned video than live (and maybe they are on slower servers), or if my neighborhood (my roomie and I share straight up standard Time Warner Cable Internet), or my machine, but the whole thing was unwatchable, and this is where the problems started cropping up:

1) There’s no option to say “okay, silverlight, just play the low res version already I don’t really care if there’s a HD version available I’d just like it to stream k thnx bye.” I am assuming this would go in the prefs panel.

2) speaking of the prefs panel, it shows up with a right click (control-click on a Mac) when you’re at standard size, but in large size, it does not. Weirdly, and additionally, the only way to get out of full-screen is by typing control-click, which is not documented anywhere. They need a little instructional blurb, like flash, letting me know how to get out of full screen mode.

3) Silverlight is an absolutely insane resource hog. I didn’t bother looking the first day, but the thing sucks up like 80% of both of my cores on my MacBook Air. The rest is taken up by kernal_task, which is a finder-level process, but i can’t help but think Silverlight is directing the task, because when you quit Safari, it all goes back down to zero.

4) God help you if you have Growl installed, because it slows Silverlight down to an unusable extent.

5) It’s play/pause controls are woefully unresponsive, and it doesn’t seem to let you hit pause and let the buffer get much bigger than you need, so you can actually watch things without htem stuttering

6) Also, it does weird things like not close when you close the window, and the video kept playing like a full ten seconds after I closed the browser window and quit it. Weird.

Still, though, this thing’s a beta, and the Mac version is obvs. not Microsoft’s top priority, and with those things in mind, I was impressed.

The Democrats really need to hire some user interface designers, though, because whoever designed the player and video clip nav was, well, not hack, but not as UX-conscious as they could have been.