Kagan Research reports that TV stations should take heart from the audience drawn by NBCOlympics.com for the winter Olympics, believes Jay Ireland, president of NBC Universal Television Stations.
The event-oriented Website drew a hefty 15.1 million unique viewers who rolled up 361 million page views. That's more than double the 145 million page views of the Salt Lake winter Olympics four years ago and 44 percent more than the 241.4 million page views for the larger Athens summer Olympics two years ago.
Besides audience muscle, the Website demonstrated the vast scalability for video content. In a two-week period, NBC crammed 9.1 million video steams amounting to over 125,000 hours of programming on NBCOlympics.com.
Ireland says NBC stations have the infrastructure in place to reinvent the concept of metropolitan-area Websites by having viewers contribute video using portable video devices, which will augment Web content from NBC's professionals.
"We need to be interactive with the ability to bring viewers or users into the product rather than simply bringing the product to them," he says. "I think that this will bring real value to the consumers." This would surpass existing "city" Websites that mostly have a static guidebook texture relying heavily on still pictures.
The event-oriented Website drew a hefty 15.1 million unique viewers who rolled up 361 million page views. That's more than double the 145 million page views of the Salt Lake winter Olympics four years ago and 44 percent more than the 241.4 million page views for the larger Athens summer Olympics two years ago.
Besides audience muscle, the Website demonstrated the vast scalability for video content. In a two-week period, NBC crammed 9.1 million video steams amounting to over 125,000 hours of programming on NBCOlympics.com.
Ireland says NBC stations have the infrastructure in place to reinvent the concept of metropolitan-area Websites by having viewers contribute video using portable video devices, which will augment Web content from NBC's professionals.
"We need to be interactive with the ability to bring viewers or users into the product rather than simply bringing the product to them," he says. "I think that this will bring real value to the consumers." This would surpass existing "city" Websites that mostly have a static guidebook texture relying heavily on still pictures.