Re: How are they doing this?

It looks like they have a player sniffer and some sort of optimization of the stream for your available bandwidth.

I looked at two pieces, both were windows media, one at about 800Kb/s, the other about 900 at 512xsomething pixels. It really isn't that hard to make video look good at an 800K datarate. They've put their own skin on the WMV player, there are notes on how to do that at msdn.microsoft.com but I've never needed to.

But your experience may differ, like I said, they have some sort of player sniff then they fish the video out of a database.