Fans Will Be Able To Watch All Olympic Events Live Online!

NBC executives decided to shift from their longtime philosophy and make every event available as it happens, convinced that the plan will build interest in the Olympics and not siphon off viewership from the traditional nightly broadcasts. That means the Internet streams will be fairly minimalistic, a move aimed at tempting fans to re-watch the competition in a more stylized presentation on the network that evening.

This move should come as a big surprise even though its a move in the opposite direction of all previous NBC Olympic coverage. Just an hour and a half after this news broke came the story that Comcasts Q1 earnings are up 30%, TV subscribers are down by 37,000 and Internet subscriptions grew by over 400,000.

Whats the connection? Comcast owns NBC and NBC amounts for about one third of Comcasts revenue. So while satellite providers may be roping video customers in from Comcast TV, Comcast can pull them back with Internet content you cant get from satellite folks and may be painful to watch on DSL.

It seems that NBC is only going along with the plan because they have to. “You’ll be able to live the moment,” said Rick Cordella, the vice president and general manager for NBC Sports Digital. But its not the camera angles and coverage youre used to seeing. What you see on the Internet real-time version
will be the world feed. This is different from the well-placed and well-funded cameras NBC will be using for their primetime re-broadcast of the days events.

They also dont know which announcers will be used for the Olympic Broadcasting System. There will be no post-event interviews in the live feed and very little in the way of graphics. All the niceties of quality mainstream coverage is left to NBCs primetime coverage.