Splicetoday

Digital
Aug 25, 2008, 11:24AM

The Olympic Experiment

NBC hyped their Olympics coverage as a billion dollar research lab for providing video content over multiple digital platforms. Anyone who watched the wide variety of events online participated in a tentative little dip in the online pool for an old media company seeking to harness the power of the Internet. However certain restrictions on content and technology decisions showed that there's still a lot NBC needs to fgure out.

Last month, NBC announced that it would be using the Olympics as a "billion-dollar research lab" to see how viewers used Olympic content on the Internet and on mobile devices. The network planned to stream thousands of hours of video from its website, NBCOlympics.com, in addition to posting Olympic data (such as scores and times) and liveblogs of certain events. Additionally, NBC distributed a number of mobile phones that would track how users might try to consume that video while on the go; the network recently discovered that the Olympics were actually helping many people use video on mobile devices for the first time ever.

Still, not everything that happened online during the Olympics was perfect. As most of us who actually tried to watch video of our favorite sports online know, not everything was actually available to watch on the Internet. NBC, for some reason, decided to limit the footage available on its website—perhaps because it feared losing its lucrative broadcast TV audience—which ultimately limited what people could watch on-demand online. As a result, market research firm eMarketer Inc. said that it estimates NBCOlympics.com will only pull in $5.75 million in video ad revenue—"surely a passable performance for a bit more than two weeks," says eMarketer, "but it represents only 1.1 percent of this year's online video ad spending projection of $505 million in the US."

Even NBC now knows that its fears of cannibalizing the TV audience were over-exaggerated. Last week, NBC Universal research president Alan Wurtzel told the AP that, even with the new online and mobile options, TV was still by far the most preferred method for watching the Games. Putting the content online merely expands the network's reach to audience members who might not otherwise watch the Games at all.

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