They use silverlight -- therefore I installed moonlight but still get a black screen.
Is there a way to watch it on Ubuntu? I now use a virtual (windows xp) machine so I can still watch it, but would like to know it there are possibilities.
SnapOverflow
Normally speaking, Moonlight would do the job. However Eurosport (amongst others) employ a layer of DRM that Microsoft have not published technical documentation for. If they did, the DRM would likely be rendered completely useless as anybody could write an application that decoded their customers' streams.
In the future there might be the possibility of a binary-only distributed plugin that contains the DRM decryptor but this relies on Microsoft to both release the technical specs under NDA to Mono devs and then agree a licensing term that allows redistribution.
The Mono devs probably have enough technical know-how to reverse-engineer the DRM but they'd probably find their patent-protection contract torn and then a nice little lawsuit to follow. Marinated in a DMCA broth (Novell is US-based).
Eurosport Player now works in Ubuntu with Firefox and Chrome without any additional steps.
Hardware acceleration does not work though, but it is browser limitation on Linux based systems.
You might want to try the Moonlight 3 Preview (this was needed for watching some Olympic video for instance, so may well work for Eurosport)