Through some quirks of scheduling, I got my first taste of Olympics action on a laptop through in-flight wireless—not the big screen in our living room—and watched the winning ski jump late at night on demand using the NBC Olympics iPhone app. The 2010 Winter Olympics may not be the “everything online live” Olympics but it’s close to the “everywhere” Olympics—as long as by everywhere in the U.S.,you mean on NBCOlympics.com.
The network, which expects to lose money on the Vancouver games, is trying a feat as tricky as some of the moves in pairs skating: produce a social media-centric Olympics without allowing video sharing or embedding. Perkins Miller, SVP of digital media for NBC Sports, makes no apologies for the decision. It’s all part of a strategy to make every one of the 17 days count for every second. Key elements include keeping all the video on NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) sites; making highlights freely available; and limiting online access to more than 1,000 hours of video on demand and 400 hours of live competition streaming to users who already pay for video via satellite, telecom or cable.
So far, it seems to be working—although it’s hard to say how much higher traffic might be if users could watch marquee events live online. Through the first two days, the network says NBCllympics.com traffic was up 350 percent from the Torino Winter Games in 2006 with 4.5 million uniques compared to Torino’s 1.02 million. NBC also says the site has delivered 4.5 million video streams, up nearly 700 percent over Torino. (NBC is also using autoplay so it’s hard to know how many of those were initiated directly by users.) No word on how many times the iPhone app has been downloaded but it’s the top free app now (it’s also a featured app, which helps) and had 5.3 million pageviews Saturday, compared with 2 million for opening day.
—Destination NBCOlympics.com : Miller explained the video strategy in an interview from Vancouver as he was preparing for the Games. “The single destination for Olympics video is at NBCOlympics. When you have a 17-day event, we do everything we can to focus everyone’s interest around a single destination. What we found is that people actually like having one place to go and our session times reflect it. People come to NBCOlympics.com. We’ve made sure we’ve got a big front door. We have a partnership with MSN—and their 100 million users—to drive the vast majority of more casual fans into NBCOlympics.com for this period of the games.” NBC still has widgets; it distributed hundreds of thousands of them during Beijing and hopes to distribute another 200,000 or more so people can embed headlines, track medals, and check out thumbnails of video.
—Social media mix: The widgets are one example of how NBC is using social media. It also has partnerships with Facebook and Twitter. NBC uses Facebook Connect and has a fan page on Facebook. A team is working with Twitter to enhance delivery of tweets to NBCOlympics.com and to push out @NBCOlympics tweets in real time. Miller: “We feel like we’ve made a real connection to the broader breadth of where people are talking or living their lives socially with the content. Having a single destination to bring them back here really is a very simple and easy for users to know where to go, rather than seeing a snippet here or there, which doesn’t tell the full story. When you get back to NBCOlympics.com, you not only will see Lindsey Vonn punch her way through the Super G, then go see her training and how her husband and her prepare for races—all the things that give you another dimension to learn about or care about Lindsey Vonn.”
—Authentication: Users need two things to watch live video streaming—a pay TV subscription and a log in that can be verified. Unlike some authentication systems, they don’t have to be at home to start the process. Instead of ISP access, this version is linked to log-in accounts for the various distributors. This time around, NBC says that more 95 percent of multichannel households have access to Olympics Online Connect My household subscribes to Charter and DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) (don’t ask). When I tried to log in from my flight between Dallas and St. Louis Saturday, I couldn’t find the magic words for Charter (NSDQ: CHTR). Luckily my DirecTV billing login worked and after a fairly quick process, I was able to watch a series of training runs on the luge. Not everyone I know has it so easy: our editorial producer was asked for her account number and customer code when she tried to access via Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC).
As for video quality, there were some buffering fits and starts but based on some other issues I experienced, that was due to the carrier (GoGo). Access includes live coverage, full event replays and long-form encores. Anyone can watch various highlight packages of the Opening Ceremony at NBCOlympics.com; only Olympics Online Connect provides a full replay.
—NBC Olympics app: As it happens, I saw Swiss ski jumper Simon Ammann’s winning jump on the NBC Olympics iPhone app produced with *AT&T* and MobiTV. The next day, I caught the same on the big screen in HD—a great way to watch but I think I saw the nuances of the jump better on the iPhone app. Athlete tweets are mixed in with event video, updates and medal counts. There’s more than enough video to snack on and the delivery is high quality.
—Plenty of curling: It’s all about perspective. NBC compares the 400-plus hours of competition
being live streamed, including most or all curling and hockey, to the single hockey game streamed as a test during Torino, not the 2,000-plus live hours offered during 2008 from Beijing. Either way, it’s not close to the amount NBC could offer; it has the rights to stream it all. Instead, the focus is more on the HD quality being offered through a video NBC’s partnership with Microsoft’s Silverlight and on the increase in highlights production. “The big learning we had in Beijing was people want those small snacks. They really want to get those singular moments in time; that’s what everybody talks about and that’s what we’re really shouldering the challenge to deliver.”
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