Yahoo Upsets NBC as Winner of Online Olympic Coverage

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The Beijing Olympics were supposed to be a boon to NBC Universal. After shelling out over $1 billion in broadcast rights and production costs, the company announced with much fanfare that it would air an unprecedented 3,600 hours of Games coverage this summer, utilizing eight NBCU platforms including its cable networks, the broadcast channel, and a special website, NBCOlympics.com.

But it's been on that website, where videos of lesser-known sports like weightlifting, wrestling, and equestrian events are streamed, that the media giant has run into some technical difficulties. The video player, which is required to do anything more than view pictures or read news stories, is not available for installation on computers with firewalls.

Even if you can access the videos, many clips are streamed without accompanying commentary. Viewers are left staring at an event apparatus, often before an athlete appears, with no contextual information.

The most popular sports aren't streamed on the web until after they air on NBC, in order to boost the network's prime-time ratings. And the video quality is often poor, with grainy resolution or jerky images.

Most embarrassing, NBC's competitor site Yahoo Sports, which has its own dedicated Olympics website, has announced that, for the first three days of the Olympic Games, its Olympics site generated over 8 million unique users, 1.3 million more than NBC's site received, according to comScore Media Metrix, a company that measures internet use.

To be fair, those numbers only reflect online viewers for the first three days of the Olympics. Numbers for the second, full week of the Olympics are due in a day or two. But since Yahoo's site doesn't even have videos of sporting events—just news and analysis from Beijing—the comScore numbers suggest that, at the beginning of the Olympics anyway, viewers bypassed NBC's site for Yahoo's, sacrificing streamed events in the process.

As a result, NBC's TV audience for the Olympics is overwhelming its online audience. NBC's own TAMI, or Total Audience Measurement Index, indicates that internet users have never comprised more than 8 percent of the total viewing audience for any single day since the Olympics started.

Still, NBC is proudly touting the 830.1 million page views, 56.1 million video streams, and 38.9 million users that NBCOlympics.com has so far garnered.

"These record numbers validate our multiplatform strategy," says Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics. "They drive viewers to share in the Olympic experience on network television in record numbers. And as a result of this unprecedented digital effort, consumers have a destination to watch thousands of hours of video and relive the great moments of these Olympics."

According to an NBC representative, the five most popular videos streamed from the site so far are all men's swimming or women's gymnastics. Meanwhile, a Yahoo spokesperson said that human-interest stories—such as one about a Swedish wrestler who sacrificed his bronze medal in protest over his judging—have been among the site's most popular.

For NBC, the news is better for TV viewership. Through the first 10 days of the Games, over 196 million people tuned in, making these Olympics the fourth-most-watched television event in U.S. history, according to the network. On Saturday evening alone, 40 million viewers watched Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal.

But until NBC figures out how to make its online-viewing experience more user-friendly and tech savvy, the company's television audience will probably continue to trounce the online one.

That's one Olympic event we can call right now.

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Yahoo Upsets NBC as Winner of Online Olympic Coverage - témata

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