NBCOlympics.com Videos: OK Traffic, But Not Great

Kevin Maney notes: NBC made a big deal about all the Olympic video it was going to put on its site and how this would be a breakthrough year for the Olympics on the Web. Well, it is and it isn't. Through yesterday, NBCOlympics.com had served up 11.1 million video streams. OK, well, that's five times more online video than Americans watched through the whole of the last Olympics, but that was four years ago and the online video world has changed. Two years ago, YouTube was serving up 11 million videos every couple of hours. And the online video audience for this Olympics is only about 0.2% of the total watching the Games from the U.S.

If the response is not that impressive, it's only NBC's fault. I've been an aggressive user of the NBCOlympics site. Like a lot of people, I can't watch soccer games at 4:30 a.m. and I don't have the patience to tune in the prime time mish-mash of events, not having any idea when something I want to see will come on. I'd love to go to the Web site, find the event I want to see, and see it, either live or taped. But I've found the site to offer a confusing smattering of events -- some soccer games but not others, and never anything that NBC is saving for TV. NBCOlympics is basically a hobbled version of what an Olympics video Web site could be -- or will someday be. It's too bad. A better site would no doubt pull in a lot bigger audience.



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