For Internet television, the Beijing Olympics represent a milestone. NBC has created a site with an unprecedented 2,200 hours of live Webcasts of Olympic events.
But the Olympics are also a powerful illustration of the current battle line between the big business of network television and the emerging medium of Web video. NBC’s broadcast and cable networks will air 700 hours of live events that will not be Webcast. And even more frustrating to some, another 700 hours of the contests will be taped and shown hours later on television, with no legal way for people in the United States to watch them before the broadcast. (All of the broadcast events are available to replay on the Internet after they are aired.)
These limits have exasperated no small number of people who heard about the spectacular opening ceremony Friday but couldn’t find any video of it online until after NBC broadcast it that night. NBC has said that it needs to keep the most popular events exclusive to television in order to serve the advertisers, affiliate stations and cable systems that have all paid heavily for a share of Olympic gold.
Now NBC has released the first batch of research on how people are actually watching the Olympics, and its findings raise questions about whether the network’s fear that more liberal Webcasting would cannibalize its broadcast audience was unfounded. (TV Decoder has more on the research so far.)
In fact, the network has found that the Web and the network drive viewers to each other as people get caught up in the Olympic dramas of the day. Half of the online users want to catch up with events they may have missed. And another 40 percent want to replay something they first saw on TV. For example, 81 million people watched the men’s 4×100 swimming relay on television and another 1.7 million watched it later on the Web.
“The Internet hardly cannibalizes; it actually fuels interest,” said Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s president of research, in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.
And even active Internet users are also watching the Olympics on television. NBC’s nightly survey finds that 90 percent of people who follow the Olympics watched it only on television. The other 10 percent also used the Internet, mobile phones or video-on-demand services from cable. But only two-tenths of one percent exclusively use the Internet to follow the Olympics and don’t watch television.
Mr. Wurtzel said this makes him believe that even if the network had chosen to simulcast the popular Olympic events on the Web, its broadcast ratings wouldn’t have been hurt.
“We know without question people want to see the best viewing experience,” he said. “If you watched the Olympics in high definition on a big screen, you are not going to watch it online. So that is why there isn’t going to be a cannibalization.”
Mr. Wurtzel declined to speak about the company’s obligations to affiliate stations and cable systems. But he added that the lesson of Beijing so far is that “the more things changed, the more they remain the same.” Even as people adopt new media like the Internet, they keep using older ones as well, he said.
In other words, he said, “the big 800-pound gorilla will remain network television.”
Comments are no longer being accepted.