How do you get your audience and advertisers interested in 3,000 hours of online sports footage over a hectic two-week worldwide event, mostly in the wrong time zone? Use as many different platforms and show as many minor sports as possible, according to Perkins Miller, SVP for digital media at NBC sports and Olympics. Speaking at our EconSports conference today, he said: “What we have the benefit of is content rights for a lot of platforms: there’s 85 sports, 3,000 hours of content …and we just can’t cover it [with TV alone].” He said: “With swimming being live on prime time, people were eager to consume it at that point in the day. We learned people want to consume it at 6 a.m. on their way to work; they want to watch the women’s eight rowing.”

The lesson for London in 2012: more niche sports, more of the time. “The lesson remains that there’s a breadth of sport at the Olympics that’s not represented by that top tier—that’s the learning we’ll take with us to London.” NBC was criticized in several quarters for holding back Olympics content during the Games.

—Yahoo outlook positive: Yahoo also had a successful Beijing games, with 38.5 million unique users in August, according to Comscore (NSDQ: SCOR), and 23 million for its Olympics microsite alone. Jimmy Pitaro, VP and GM for Yahoo sports and entertainment, said that despite problems in other parts of Yahoo’s business, online sports continued to grow. “It’s been challenging but we haven’t taken any kind of hit in terms of video. We’re coming close to being sold out in terms of video inventory. But like everyone else we’re struggling on display.”

—Yahoo to bid for more rights? Yahoo bought the exclusive video rights for Major League Baseball last year, but here’s what he said about doing more of that: “If they [more broadcast rights] went exclusively online, then would we be in the bidding?  The answer is yes. We’re the number-one sports site in all the key metrics and if we weren’t in the mix., I’d be disappointed.” But certainly for the big sports like NBA and golf, that’s not going to happen any time soon, he said.

—IMG bullish, says ad spend will follow quality: IMG IMG, which specializes in sponsorships, is in a very different part of the sports video food chain than Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). But SVP and global head of digital media Oliver Gers said he was also “comfortable with the outlook.” He added: “I’m quite bullish about the business. If you look at the web, there is still an imbalance between consumption and advertising spend. The web is much better positioned than most media like print or TV networks.”

—What advertisers want from online sports video: Brian Biniak, founder and CEO of Jacked.com, said that particularly for traditional media companies like newspapers and broadcasters, advertisers “are looking for them to provide additional layers of engagement”. As for Jacked.com, which provides a simultaneous “second screen” of content for online sports video, as many as 3,500 35,000 people will watch any given football game, and 260,000 192,000 people used the service for between 39 minutes and an hour. Binian said Jacked was starting to used targeted advertising, synchronized by zip code and user profile.  “We’ve been able to show we can get premium content as well the ROI,” he said. Binian said that the people who were buying online advertising were also buying it on TV: “It’s a subset. We’re having a conversation about the crossover.”

Correction: We originally reported that 3,500 people watched live football games through Jacked.com at any one time, though the actual figure is 35,000. We also said that 260,000 of the site’s users used the service for between 39 minutes and an hour but the correct figure is 192,000. We regret the error.

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