When Will the IOC Realize the Olympics Are a Made-for-Web Event?

Kevin Maney implores: The Olympics suck on network TV. They always have. Pre-packaged, pre-fabricated, tape-delayed, and presuming to know what sports you are interested in seeing, network Olympic coverage is the ultimate example of trying to stuff the long tail down the mass market's throats.

There isn't a single sport in the Olympics that the mass market would watch on TV if it weren't part of the Olympics -- other than maybe seeing the U.S. men's basketball team. Me, I'd watch every U.S. women's soccer match and events like team handball that probably won't get a whiff of NBC air time, but couldn't care less about swim heats.

Anyway, the Olympics is all long tail packed into a very short time. Today, there is only one absolutely logical way to present this to the public: Put it all on the Web, both live and on-demand -- the latter because in China, most of the events are going to happen in the wee hours of the morning for American viewers. Let us tune in to exactly what we want -- and totally avoid Bob Costas. Then NBC should approach its broadcast version as an overview of highlights, news and stories, along with the few mass-appeal events, like men's basketball finals.

True, NBC is putting lots of Olympics video on the Web -- but it's far from any kind of blanket coverage that the long tail would demand. 

Of course, the reason that won't happen anytime soon is because of rights issues and the lingering money to be made from advertisers on network TV. Both will change in time.

Meanwhile, it's getting harder to keep people boxed out of seeing the Games on the Web. Seems that more and more pirate-style work-arounds keep popping up.