NBC's Olympic Task

In sports, most viewers prefer to to see something as it happens; the thrill of watching an event if one already knows the outcome isn't quite the same as the thrill of being part of the event in real time.

For Olympic viewers from the U.S., where NBC owns exclusive television broadcast rights, not everything is shown live. The opening ceremonies, which happened at 8 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, August 8, were broadcast live in many parts of the world but held for a full 12 hours on "tape delay" by NBC so it could show the opening ceremony at 8 p.m. Eastern Time.

The decision, while standard in U.S. broadcasts that are shown in tape delay in the Pacific Time Zone, was upsetting to some U.S. viewers who felt that all events should be live, even if it meant seeing the event live on the web and then having it shown twelve hours later on traditional broadcast television.

NBC defended its decision through its lead anchor for the 2008 Olympics, Bob Costas.

"Even with the 12-hour time difference between Beijing and America’s Eastern time zone," Costas said, "the Olympic schedule will allow us to bring you many of the major events of our prime-time shows live."

According to The New York Times, though, tape delays are also being rolled out according to U.S. time zone, even for events shown live in the U.S. Eastern time zone, to keep everything squarely in prime time.

"It turns out that no Olympic event that NBC promotes as being live in prime time is shown live in the Mountain and Pacific time zones," wrote the Times' Richard Sandomir, "as they are in any other TV series. But the Olympics is not just any program, or so NBC tells us."

NBC sees its broadcast rights as covering every type of video, whether it's on cable, satellite, or online. For good reason, too, as it paid the International Olympic Committee almost $900 million for the exclusive traditional broadcast rights in the United States. The resulting record-breaking viewership for the opening ceremonies, even on tape delay, means NBC is outpacing coverage of any other non-domestic Olympics, which bodes well for its advertisers.

NBColympics.com also got huge numbers on Saturday. NBC Universal president for research Alan Wurtzel said each of its 4.8 million unique users on Saturday spent significant time on the site, generating an aggregate of 62.7 million page views that day.

The New York Times and other newspapers wrote articles on Saturday morning about ways that viewers managed to watch the opening ceremony live, and these issues will become more and more pressing as the Olympics progress throughout the next few weeks.