NBCOlympics.com: Winner? Loser? Or Hobbled From the Start?

Kevin Maney gets caught in the spin cycle: There seem to be two versions of stories out there about NBC's online Olympics coverage. One set touts the huge-sounding numbers: NBCOlympics.com made 2,200 hours of video available and served up 1.2 billion page and 72 million video streams. All of which is quite impressive. But the other set of stories is far more skeptical, pointing out that NBC sold only $5.8 million in ads on the site, vs. CBS hauling in $23 million in ads when it showed the NCAA basketball tournament on-line in March.

The way I see it, NBCOlympics.com was a half-success, full of blown opportunities. The most compelling reason to visit the Web site was the video. The Olympics are perfect for the Web -- the ultimate long tail of sports with lots of niche sports that would never interest a broad TV audience but could lure a dedicated following on the Web. It's even more perfect when the Olympics are in a far-off time zone, where most events take place in the middle of the night for a U.S. audience. If NBC had put video of every event on the site, it would've struck gold. Instead, NBC protected TV broadcasts and only offered a confusing smattering of events and highlights. There was no way to know whether the next U.S. field hockey or water polo match was going to be on the site, for instance. Some were, some weren't.

And then there was Silverlight, Microsoft's video technology. NBC signed a deal with Microsoft long before it invested, along with Fox, in creating video site Hulu. Hulu plays right in your browser. It requires Flash (like YouTube does), but most people already have that. Silverlight makes you download and install a plug-in most people don't already have. That's always an impediment. Plus, it flat out doesn't look as good or work as well as Hulu's technology.

I desperately wanted NBCOlympics.com to be a great site and turn me into an on-line Olympics watcher. Instead, I started out enthusiastically watching on the site, and slowly grew frustrated and gave up. NBC has a lot of work to do before the Vancouver games.