NBC has been raked over the coals for continuing to tape-delay TV coverage of the biggest events of the 2012 Olympic Games in a world where the internet makes the results so readily available to the general public. But in other respects, the venerable TV network is dealing with this internet thing just fine.
On Friday, NBC said that after a week of competition in London, its website -- NBCOlympics.com -- has served up over 744 million page views, up from a mere 160 million during the Beijing games four years ago. The site has also streamed over 75 million video feeds to viewers around the globe, according to NBC.
Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, released a statement praising his own group for the lengths they went to ensure that the world could follow the games on the net. "The result has been record-setting viewership, traffic and engagement on all of our platforms," he said. "We could not be more satisfied and are looking forward to continuing to extend access to these incredible Games on multiple screens."
Hundreds of millions of users doesn't necessarily qualify NBC for a medal in traffic management. But it still deserves some praise -- and not just from itself. This takes some planning. Prior to the games, outsiders such as web performance outfit Yottaa questioned whether the NBC site was ready to handle such large amounts of traffic.
"In general, the performance of the site is way below average," Yottaa CEO Coach Wei told Wired just before the Games. "If they don’t make changes and the traffic increases by 100 times, it will have real problems."
Yottaa also questioned whether the official Olympics website -- www.london2012.com -- was ready for the worldwide onslaught. But the London Olympic Committee and SOASTA, an Silicon Valley outfit that helped test the site prior to the games, say that the site has already received over a billion page views.
SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos is calling it the most visited sports site in history -- but that's what you'd expect him to say.
But the official Olympics website doesn't do that much video. That's at the NBC site. NBC says that to date, five events have been live-streamed by more than a million people. The U.S. women's gymnastic team took the gold on Tuesday and almost 1.5 million people streamed the coverage over the net.
When swimming titan Michael Phelps smoked the competition, including teammate Ryan Lochte, to take gold in the 200 individual medley, about 1.2 million people tuned in, and another million streamed the action when Phelps became the most decorated Olympian of all time two days earlier in the men's 4 x 200 men's freestyle relay. Other U.S. gold medal performances in women's swimming and men’s gymnastics also cracked the million mark.
If you don't like NBC's TV coverage, just stick with your browser.
Image: RachelC/Flickr
