It’ll be interesting to look back on this post when the elections are over to see who the winner is but right now I’m watching the Democratic National Convention in all it’s HD glory.

The video gallery for the official Democratic Convention site has been developed using Silverlight by the folks at Vertio (who also developed the Hard Rock Memorabilia site and released the open source Slide.Show project).

Working with Level3 and Move Networks they are delivering a live HD video experience (not just maxing out your bandwidth – they use adaptive streaming to balance the quality to your connection and PCs capabilities) and within minutes of a speaker finishing at the podium the clip is available for on-demand viewing as well.

The quality is pretty amazing. I look at projects like this with 6 years of experience live streaming Big Brother as a filter and a minimum bar for quality and I wish I had access to these tools back then! They take Windows Media to a whole new level (and with Silverlight they bring in back to the Intel powered Macs with the same level of fidelity). Right now Silverlight doesn’t offer a Linux solution, but with the Moonlight player we can hope the same experience isn’t that far off.

I thought I was impressed, but the folks from Online Video Watch and paidContent.org seem to back my opinion up ;)