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NBC Wired About Expanding Olympic Coverage to Cable, Online Outlets

Posted on: Wednesday, 8 August 2007, 06:05 CDT

By Michael Hiestand

For decades, the U.S. TV formula for the Olympics was about as unchanging as the shot put competition.

But NBC, at next year's Beijing Summer Games, will take that old formula, largely created by TV pioneer Roone Arledge in the 1960s, and use the Internet to super-size it beyond all 20th-century TV coverage -- combined.

NBC executives gathered Tuesday in Beijing announced plans that include 2,200 hours of free live Internet video coverage on nbcolympics.com, a site being launched today that -- unlike temporary NBC sites for past Games -- will stay online permanently.

Yikes. Americans have never had any access to live online Olympic coverage. In the 1990s, it was assumed it would never arrive largely because putting Olympic action online meant it became available globally.

That would play havoc with the enormous revenue Olympic organizers get -- like the $894 million NBC will pay for Beijing -- in TV rights sold to networks on a country-by-country basis. And before broadband service became widely available, watching live sports online seemed dumb.

Plus, NBC will offer another 3,000 hours of online Beijing video highlights and replays -- also free.

August is the least-productive month for the U.S. economy. Next August, with that Olympic action at office workers' fingertips, expect Greenland to temporarily pass the United States in worker productivity.

On TV, NBC and its cable channels will also carry about 1,400 hours of coverage -- up from about 1,200 from the 2004 Athens Summer Games.

It's up from NBC's 171 total TV hours from the Atlanta Summer Games in 1996. Conventional wisdom then was that Americans would never see Olympic action on cable because NBC's local affiliate stations, or any network's stations, would balk at their "exclusive" Olympic action also showing up on cable.

What happened? NBC's plan to create Olympic coverage on steroids is only the most dramatic example of sports programmers generally having finally learned from the adage about how Native Americans used all parts of the buffalo they hunted.

Rather than simply stripping off the prized fur in Beijing for prime time and letting everything else go to waste, NBC will use it online and on cable.

This will get complicated. With the 12-hour time difference between Beijing and the U.S. East Coast, NBC will be able to show some top draws -- swimming, gymnastics and beach volleyball -- in U.S. prime time.

But will NBC continue to hold other action for prime time when it could be shown online live?

And will NBC go online with simulcasts of its live daytime cable TV coverage?

And will NBC's online Olympic tonnage depend largely on the Olympic world feed -- which captures every second of every event and is available to networks that bought Olympic TV rights -- or will NBC create most of its own online coverage?

Such issues, NBC spokesman Mike McCarley said Tuesday from Beijing, aren't resolved. But, he said, NBC executives made progress by huddling in a Beijing hotel the last few days. Sure, they could have just taken cabs downtown from their Manhattan offices and brainstormed in Chinatown. But, he said, "It's amazing what you can get done if you fly around the world, lock yourself in a room and turn off your phones."

PGA preview: CBS' coverage of the PGA Championship will include handheld cameras for so-called "SwingVision" replays, which can show more than 1,000 frames a second compared with fewer than 100 in regular replays. Rather than the usual SwingVision replays of tee shots, CBS director Steve Milton said, the mobility will deliver such replays from anywhere.

Online, TNT-produced coverage at pga.com will offer 45 hours of live video action -- up from 11 last year.

CBS' Jim Nantz suggests Tiger Woods has already given himself "a four-shot lead" with his eight-stroke win Sunday in the Bridgestone Invitational -- "he's deflated the field" -- and adds, "If you took a poll of the most popular people on the planet, Tiger would finish in the top 10."

Said CBS' David Feherty, "Along with his wife."

Bud's back: Dropped from NBC's Wimbledon coverage after 35 years, Bud Collins joins ESPN for its Wimbledon, Australian Open and French Open tennis coverage. Although ESPN doesn't have U.S. Open TV rights, he will report from that event. Meaning Collins, 78, will get more TV work at tennis' majors than he had at NBC -- "that's what really pleases me." (c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

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