No Matter How NBC Spins It, Olympics Web Strategy Comes Up A Loser (?)

I dugg this because it seemed and interesting and very true take. NBC probably missed an advertising opportunity from a revenue standpoint but annecdotal evidence and from pure hours of streaming video standpoint I see this as a success. It seems that people generally liked seeing lesser broadcasted events and elimination events online (sans commentary) and that led to a cross polination of viewership back to television. From a marketing standpoint, it was a success and proves to be a model of what we can do in the future (or broadcasters can do.) Was Silverlight the right choice? Don't know. Could Flash have been better? Probably. Only because more people use that format and are used to it. (YouTube uses Flash video, correct?) Anyway, while this was a lost revenue opportunity, NBC proved it could handle the challenge of streaming hours of content from a live event and have people generally happy with it, while promoting it back to a television broadcast, leading to one of the most watched TV events in history--from China, no less. Like I said, it was not a failure by any means, except for the bottom line. From TechCrunch: "Despite its special Silverlight-powered Website and more than 2,000 hours of online video, it looks like NBC flubbed its opportunity to make its Olympics Web revenues more than a rounding error. NBCOlympics.com may have streamed 72 million videos and racked up 1.2 billion pageviews, but Yahoo Sports still edged it out with an average of 4.7 million visitors a day versus 4.3 million (source: Nieisen Online). And Yahoo didn’t even have video. NBC is spinning its numbers as a success to the New York Times today, in response an estimate eMarketer put out on Friday that NBC’s Olympics video ad revenues came to only $5.75 million. That compares to $23 million that CBS made from video ads when it streamed the NCAA basketball tournament live on its Website in March."

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