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Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Olympics: Anywhere, anytime
Beginning with the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, organizers have tried to use the Internet to reach virtually every corner of the world.
This year, they might just succeed.
NBC Universal will broadcast an unprecedented 3,600 hours of coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games. Can’t get to a TV? On its Web site, NBC will have video on demand. Can’t get to your computer? NBC, as well as wireless providers such as AT&T and Verizon will also beam mobile video and alerts to your cell phone.
That’s just the start of the Olympics long reach across the World Wide Web. On Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee will launch a special YouTube channel available exclusively in 77 countries and territories where NBC or others don’t have broadcast rights - places ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. (Sorry, YouTube fans; the channel won’t be available in the United States).
Another service, sponsored by PC maker Lenovo and an Internet company called TV Tonic, lets you download full length videos of events overnight and watch them on your laptop later.
This year’s Olympian Web efforts are of course a giant leap from those early Internet incursions into the Atlanta games.
Back then, Web coverage was pretty much limited to some static pages hosted by IBM Corp. that often were often glitchy and slow to load. Widespread, easy-to-use video on the Web was little more than a pipe dream, and cell phones were used for, well, making phone calls.
