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Watching the Olympics

The run-up to Beijing has begun and if you haven't been in a cave for the last month, you know that Opening Ceremonies take place on Friday, 08/08/08. Eight being obviously a lucky number in Chinese. For the first time in this Olympiad, there will be several ways to see almost every Olympic event live, despite the sixteen hour time difference from the eastern US.

NBC is utilizing its full range of cable outlets to broadcast the Games. Live broadcasts will be spread among NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Telemundo, Universal HD and Oxygen. Each channel will specialize in different sports, with Universal HD offering 24 hour HD replays of MSNBC and CNBC coverage of multiple sports. What will be new this year is NBC's dedication to online streaming.

NBC will stream live online 2200 hours of competition in 25 sports on NBCOlympics.com and will also webcast an additional 3000 hours of on demand events and highlights. It is an unprecedented use of video streaming made possible only by recent advance allowing NBC to control the streaming so that it is only available in the US, where NBC has the rights. With so much television coverage and so many of the events occurring live in the early morning hours in much of the US, it will be very interesting to see what NBC's numbers look like and how they compare to CBS's streaming numbers from the NCAA basketball tournament, the last event of any even near comparable magnitude.

An additional resource for Olympic coverage was announced today. Sports Business Journal and its sister publication Sports Business Daily announced a free site, the Beijing Olympics, (catchy name) to run the month of August from Beijing. It is essentially a blog, although they insist on calling it a website. It features stories, photos, blogs and is otherwise set up like most blogs you see these days. It will be an excellent on the ground resource covering all the business aspects of the Games as they unfold. Check it out.

And for a reminder of why we want to watch:

Full post as published by Sports Biz on August 04, 2008 (boomark / email).