Here's a piece from Timothy Lee at Techdirt on NBC's Web video Olympics coverage — he points out it left a lot to be desired. I wondered if it was just me that thought so — most of the events I wanted to watch were not available for streaming, the site was difficult to navigate in terms of finding videos and finding schedules, and the Silverlight plugin requirement was a pain, though it would have been worth it if after installing it there was a big selection of video to watch. Everything seemed designed to point you away from the Web and back to TV as quickly as possible.
Lee writes, "NBC apparently got about 72 million video streams during this Olympics season, and is touting this as a great success. It's true that this is a lot more than any previous Olympics, but I don't think NBC has anything to crow about. Remember, this is the most famous sporting event in the world, and it got non-stop media coverage for close to a month. Yet in a country with 300 million people, they only got a total of 72 million streams? That's less than one stream for every 4 Americans."
Tags: olympics
