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Updated 9:20 a.m. PDT, with comments from conference call.

Microsoft on Monday announced, as expected, that it is ready with a final version of its Silverlight 2 media player.

Silverlight 2 will be available for download starting Tuesday, Microsoft said. Among the new features are support for digital rights management technology, improved cross-platform support and deep zoom technology. Microsoft also announced a range of new partners including AOL, Blockbuster, CBS College Sports, Toyota, and Yahoo Japan.

Microsoft also disclosed some numbers for the Olympics work it did with NBC. Over a 17-day period, Microsoft said NBCOlympics.com had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video watched.

Overall, Microsoft said the Olympics helped boost Silverlight’s U.S. penetration by 30 percent, the software maker said.

“We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed,” Microsoft developer unit VP Scott Guthrie said in a statement.

Still, that means Silverlight continues to have a very long way to go to compete with Flash, which is installed on nearly all Windows PCs.

On a conference call, Guthrie said that in some countries, Silverlight already has 50 percent penetration. He said he expected deployments would “accelerate quite nicely” as some of the sites that require Silverlight 2 get up and running. In all, he said he expects hundreds of millions of PCs to be running Silverlight 2 “very quickly.”

“Certainly coming out with a new browser plug-in is an ambitious project,” Guthrie said. “We knew it was going to take a couple of years to get where we need to be.”

Guthrie said he feels pretty good that Silverlight is already at the one in four number and said that the company will continue to do deals to boost penetration, as it has with HP which includes Silverlight on its PCs.

Existing users of both Silverlight as well as the Silverlight 2 beta will be automatically be upgraded to Silverlight 2 over the coming weeks, he said.

Disclosure: CBS College Sports is a unit of CBS, as is CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News.