February 9th, 2010 
Brad McGraw NBC has come out against adding Olympic content online. In 2008 for the summer Olympics NBC provided 2,200 hours of live streaming, this year they plan to only provide 400 hours (Curling and Hockey). Their reasoning?
“It is about the watercooler moment and staying connected to the games through instant storytelling. People are not dying to watch lots of long-form content on a 13-inch screen.”
So their plan is to only offer highlights of other events.
On top of this they are actively going to try and cut any unauthorized live feed of any event.
“Our aim is to make access to pirated material inconvenient, low quality and hard to find,” said Rick Cotton, NBC’s evp and general counsel. In terms of Web piracy, “you are never going to go to zero. But there has been a sea change in terms of recognition of the problem.”
Is this really the best direction to take? It actually flies in the face of their own research during the 2008 summer Olympics.
“The Internet hardly cannibalizes; it actually fuels interest,” said Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s president of research, in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.
Is it any wonder that NBC is predicting its going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars broadcasting the Olympics? Instead of embracing the online world and expanding advertising to that, they’ve decided to spend money to combat it
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