Trying to watch the Olympics on TV and the Web

How is your Olympics-watching experience going?

You may have caught some of the Olympic Games over the weekend, most likely in front of your television set and not online. NBC Universal, which owns the U.S. broadcast rights, said it attracted a 114 million TV viewers, which was itself an Olympic record. The Web viewing audience was a fraction of that, although a lot better than during the last Olympics (more details below).

Sure, there's griping about the TV experience. Chief among them is the fact that you couldn't watch some events live, such as the opening ceremony. But from what I caught, this beautiful, intense 4-hour celebration may have been best enjoyed tape-delayed, broken into 12-minute bite-sized videos and aided by the informed commentary. I went to bed somewhere between the contingents from Iraq and Iran walking into the stadium and woke up to see the runner taking the torch on its last loop on the rim of the stadium.

Still, a lot of people would have wanted the choice, and more exposure may have helped, not hurt, NBC's bottom line. Not sure if I hallucinated the lighting of the torch, I attempted to find video clips ...

... of it online so I could e-mail friends and family, and thereby aid NBC by building up buzz. But I failed to find a working link of an event that was 24 hours old.

The live issue is more pressing, of course, for actual athletic events. For East Coast viewers, NBC did air live swimmer Michael Phelps shattering one of his own records. But here, on the West Coast, we learned about the record falling elsewhere and, the suspense gone, got to tune in merely to watch how Phelps broke the record, Silicon Alley Insider complained.

In the online realm, NBC has said it is airing more than 2,200 hours of video of Olympic events, available to be watched after downloading a player from its site, as the LAT's Web Scout blog describes. But there have been mixed reports about the availability and quality of the video, not to mention technical difficulties.

Still, Nielsen Online reported today that a small but growing U.S. Internet audience is visiting NBC's Olympics site: 1.4 million Thursday, 2.6 million for the opening ceremony Friday and 4 million Saturday. Yahoo was second with 1.4 million Thursday, 1.5 million Friday and 3.3 million Saturday.

Those numbers are pretty good compared with other big sporting events: Nearly 5 million online viewers visited Fox Sports on MSN during the busiest day of this year's NCAA basketball championship, and 4.4 million visited the site the Monday after the Super Bowl.

NBC's own statistics include the number of videos watched and time spent on the site. On Friday, there were 1.3 million videos streamed, and the average visitor spent 10 minutes on the site. By Sunday, that had jumped to 3.42 million videos streamed and 15 minutes on average spent on the site.   

On Sunday, NBCOlympics.com saw 5.1 million unique users and 66.7 million page views. In comparison, the record for the 2004 Games in Athens was 1.46 million unique users and 20.6 million page views. Total video streamed for the entire Athens Games was 2.2 million, according to an NBC spokesman.

The Wall Street Journal reports that although 90% viewed the Olympics on TV, and 0.2% on the Internet only, 10% caught Olympic coverage on both TV and online. This should be a sign to TV decision-makers not to cast the Internet as their enemy, the blog Mashable argues.

Today, the first workday with the Olympics, NBCOlympics.com will most likely see a bump in numbers as workers hit the site, says Jon Gibs, vice president of media analytics at Nielsen Online. He sees another benefit to the hours of Olympic video: Some sports, such as women's badminton, may build up an audience that will be there for them -- and advertisers -- during the next Olympics.

For those who tried a different route -- finding non-NBC video of events online -- it was a time-consuming experience of hunting and pecking for video only to have the link go dead, possibly because sites received shut-down notices from a representative of the International Olympic Committee, according to Silicon Alley Insider.

I clicked on a lot of dead links over the weekend, gave myself poor marks for technical skill, speed and stick-to-it-ness. Then I gave up.

No medal for me. 

-- Michelle Quinn

Photo: Michael Phelps competing at the Olympics Monday. Credit: Michael Kappeler/ AFP/ Getty Images

Comments

[Helen]

I would have loved to be able to watch the online coverage. But NBC shuts me out simply because I have a 3-year-old, pre-Intel Mac.

[geomom]

Resident of California (aka tape-delay city!)--I am checking the NBC website for the sole purpose of attempting to figure out which sports are on which channel. Telemundo had better coverage of basketball and (REAL) volleyball (and naturally soccer!) than the main NBC affiliate. If I have to watch one more minute of BEACH volleyball...YAY! They found Kerry's wedding ring!...PUH-LEEZE! Where was water polo? Why didn't they even SHOW the Australian men synchronized divers? Rowing? Tennis? Cycling?

Showing tape-delayed swimming on the west coast is IDIOCY! I have two school-aged children who have yet to watch ANY swimming, except via Comcast ON DEMAND highlights.

The networks could learn something from Versus coverage of the Tour de France--show it LIVE at an ungodly hour, then have "enhanced primetime" coverage in case you missed the first go-round or care about the forced drama of "in-depth profiles".

I am old enough to have fond memories of ABC's Wide World of Sports--tape delay out of necessity. This is a different world. NBC seems to be missing an opportunity here...

[wtay]

Personally I think the TV coverage sucks - if there isn't a US athlete in contention for a medal (ideally Phelps) then the event simply doesn't get shown at all. And if that weren't bad enough most of the commentators come across as raving and highly misinformed idiots...I mean does anybody care what Costas has to say about anything. I watch 90% of my Olympics online via the BBC in the UK and ABC in Australia - at least they are balanced in their coverage, know what they are talking about and relatively free of annoying ads for the likes of McDonald's (do you really believe a pro athlete would even walk into a McDonald's let alone order and eat something!).

NBC should be using the time delay to their advantage - show sports live through the day - and then a primetime wrap up of everything - not 3 hours of stupid beach volleyball and men's gymnastics.

[FMK2]

I agree with previous comments in that NBC has no excuse for not having live coverage. Yes, many events are covered live for East Coast viewers (in Prime Time at least), but NBC apparently hasn't figured out that the majority of their nationwide audience lives outside the Eastern time zone! (A problem they share with the other US networks, and not just with respect to Olympic coverage.)

NBC should take a look at how coverage is done outside the US. For example, my wife and I were in Europe during the 2000 games in Australia, and we were able to watch a wide variety of the events on Europe's Eurosport channel. Eurosport ran Olympic coverage 24-hours a day during the games, live when the games were actually in progress, and highlights when Australia was asleep. It didn't matter what time it was in Europe; if the event was happening in Australia, it was live on Eurosport. (We watched live sculling at midnight in Frankfurt.)

Eurosport is sort of like ESPN in that it's a full-time sports channel, but it's so NOT like ESPN (or, more to the point in this case, NBC) in that it actually covered the events in toto. All the events. And if a live event was in progress, there were no funky interviews, no boring life histories of the athletes, or anything other than coverage of the sport. (They did do some background stuff during times when events weren't live, but that is a reasonable thing to do.)

Oh, and by the way, no shots of the commentators! That's right, the commentators were never on screen -- they were heard and not seen! How cool is that?!? (There is actually a reason for not seeing the commentators, at least during their Olympics coverage. Eurosport was simulcasting in multiple countries and languages. We watched the games on Eurosport in Frankfurt one morning, and continued when we got to London later that day. Same coverage, but in German in Frankfurt and English in London. Still, it was nice to stay focused on the events and not have to stare at the broadcasters.)

The fact that NBC has a lock on the broadcast rights in the US means we're stuck with whatever they show us, but it would sure be nice if they had to compete for ratings. Maybe then they'd find that the best ratings come from providing more live coverage of a wider variety of events (even those events where the US is not necessarily favored to win a medal).

[mattresses]

im sorry to say that the olympics are unwatchable on tv and the web.