New Media Olympic Coverage
I’m flying to Winnipeg and I’ll be away from my computer until next week, but before I go, I had to at least mention what is going to be the best new media coverage of any Olympic Games ever.
The big story is NBC’s Olympic site which will cover over 2,200 hours of live video streaming highlighting 25 sports and 3,000 hours of on-demand video including highlights and replays. This is unprecedented online coverage and is substantially more than NBC Television will be providing. Add in photo galleries, athlete bios, statistics and nanogaming and there’s no denying that the for the first time, the best coverage of the Olympic games is going to be online.
NBC is taking a shotgun approach to see what works online and is using the popularity of the games to get some good data and testing under their belts. What they learn from this impressive experiment could put them ahead of other broadcasters for future projects. I’m thoroughly impressed at what they have planned.
Back in Canada our own official Olympic broadcaster is not doing too bad of a job with its new media coverage either. Streaming video will be available, but not nearly the same number of hours that NBC will be providing. They also have regularly updated Olympic headline and athlete blogs.
The IOC has placed extreme limitations on what athletes can blog during the games. Violation of the IOC’s blogging rules could have athletes, “withdraw(n) of such person’s Olympic identity and accreditation card” and, “taking legal action for monetary damages and imposing other sanctions.” With restrictions like these, it’s nice to see that athletes have bothered to blog at all.
Being a sucker for both the Olympics and new media makes this a really great games to watch, read and comment on. It’ll be interesting to see what other new media coverage will gain traction. I’m already watching the live blogging happening over at ScribbleLive.
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