—3.4 million hours of live streaming video and audio by 3 million unique users of the free MMOD video players across all sites, including the CBS Audience Network and various partners. Up more than 20 percent over MMOD 2009. For comparison: the network reported 7.52 million total unique for the 2009 video player, up 58 percent over 4.76 million in 2009, and 8.6 million hours of streaming media, compared with 4.92 million in 2008, or 75 percent growth)

—Roughly 16 percent of all traffic Thursday came during one hour: 2:00 p.m. - 2:59 P.M. ET 533,000 streaming hours with 147,000 during the last 14 minutes.

—When Florida and BYU went into double overtime, so did MMOD users,, making it the most-watched game with 521,000 hours delivered.

—The Boss Button was hit about 1.7 million times but hard to believe the cartoon by Dilbert creator Scott Adams fooled anyone.

The online MMOD player may be free but the same access via iPhone runs $9.99 for full game video—when the connection is strong enough—and Westwood One audio. No stats for that yet but it’s the #1 paid app in the iTunes Store as of late Friday afternoon. We’ll have more numbers as the tourney progresses.

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Now, he says, Yahoo Sports—which is “doing a very good job on the PC”—will be able to bolster its presence on the iPhone—and also build a presence on Facebook. “We haven’t been as active on Facebook as we should be,” he says. “It’s a top priority for our media businesses.” During a discussion with Pitaro and Citizen Sports CEO Mike Kerns, the two men also talked to us about the future of fantasy sports online, the overlap between Yahoo Sports and Citizen Sports and also some details about the deal, which will see about 30 employees joining Yahoo.

Some highlights:

—The new audience for fantasy sports: Pitaro says that Yahoo determined that in the fantasy sports market Yahoo Sports was no longer competing so much with the “usual suspects” (ie ESPN (NYSE: DIS), CBSSports) but rather with Facebook. “People have a finite amount of time to spend leisurely online,” he says. That time is increasingly being spent on Facebook, so the deal lets Yahoo reach new users who might not have time to consume “the fancy product” on the PC. It still hasn’t been decided, however, how exactly the Citizen Sports and the Yahoo fantasy sports platforms will be combined—or what the ultimate branding will be.

—The two iPhone apps: Currently, Yahoo Sports has a fantasy football iPhone app—and Citizen Sports has one of its own. Kerns says that in areas like that, “the goal will be to collaborate on the best single application.” Those overlaps, however, are rare. For instance, Pitaro says that Yahoo had discussed building a broad sports app but hadn’t done so because of a lack of resources. Citizen Sports, however, does have an all-encompassing sports app (Sportacular). “It’s fantastic,” Pitaro says. “We don’t have to go out and build this thing.”

—Deal terms: Kerns says his company—which has “millions” of users accessing its apps on Facebook and via their mobile phones—had been “intermittently profitable,” was growing and had recently built out its own ad sales teams. The company wasn’t looking to sell but realized that what it had built had “created shareholder value.” All of its 30 or so employees will now join Yahoo.

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And, indeed, the move immediately gives Yahoo clout in the social networking and mobile sports spaces, where it has been weak. Citizen Sports owns a series of popular sports apps on the iPhone and on social networking sites, including what it says is the most popular fantasy football app on Facebook. By contrast, Yahoo has long been the top player in the online fantasy sports market, but only last September did it release a fantasy football iPhone app and, as far as I can tell, it does not have any sports apps at all on Facebook.

In its announcement, Yahoo says Yahoo Sports content will be integrated into Citizen Sports’ apps. Together, the company says, Yahoo Sports and Citizen Sports will create a “more personally relevant experience, drive deeper user engagement and create opportunities for advertisers to interact with audiences in new environments.”

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released, although AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher—who predicted the deal earlier this week—put the price at between $40 million and $50 million. Citizen Sports had raised roughly $10 million in a funding round four years ago, back when it was operating under the name ProTrade Sports.

This is Yahoo’s third acquisition under CEO Carol Bartz. Going ahead, the company has said it is interested in three general areas—deals that would add “important technology and the people behind it,” content-related deals, and geographic buys that would let the company move into or strengthen its position in a market.

Here’s our earlier report on what Yahoo may buy next.

The release:

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Mar 17, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE)—As part of its ongoing commitment to be the center of people’s online lives, Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Citizen Sports (http://www.citizensports.com), a company that brings the world of sports to fans’ favorite social networking sites and mobile devices through innovative applications. This acquisition will strengthen Yahoo!‘s social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the entire Web, and offering a highly customizable social experience.

“Yahoo! is in a unique position to combine our deep expertise in content and aggregation technology to offer a highly personalized social experience,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, Consumer Products Group, Yahoo!. “Sports has been among the earliest online categories to experience rapid social proliferation, and the combination of Citizen Sports leading products with our world-class sports experience on Yahoo! Sports is a win-win for sports fans globally.”

Millions of people across the globe use Citizen Sports’ array of social and mobile products to play fantasy sports, fill out brackets, check live scores and read up-to-the minute news on sports including football, hockey, soccer, baseball, racing, rugby, hockey and cricket. Yahoo! Sports’ content will be integrated into these products, creating a seamless experience for sports fans wherever they are. On Yahoo! Sports, users will be able to broadcast their allegiances, create or join a conversation with friends and fans and cheer for their teams through Citizen Sports’ applications. This integration will further transform Yahoo! into a more personally relevant experience, drive deeper user engagement and create opportunities for advertisers to interact with audiences in new environments.

As the #1 destination for online Sports with more than 39 million monthly unique users in the U.S.*, Yahoo! Sports provides people with the most timely, relevant and comprehensive sports news, information and programming. Citizen Sports’ network of popular applications for Facebook, MySpace (NYSE: NWS), hi5, iPhone and Android span professional, college and high school sports.

“Citizen Sports was founded with the intent to enable fans to access news, scores and fantasy games on the platform of their choice,” said Mike Kerns, founder and CEO of Citizen Sports. “We look forward to becoming a part of Yahoo! and bringing our social experiences to their 600 million users around the globe.”

Citizen Sports was founded by Mike Kerns and Jeff Ma in 2004. Since then the company has brought together millions of sports fans from around the world to enjoy sports and connect with their friends. Citizen Sports is based in San Francisco.

Yahoo! expects to complete this acquisition in the second quarter of 2010. Financial terms were not disclosed.

* February 2010, comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), U.S.

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Granted, even World Golf Tour isn’t completely immune to the craze. CEO Yuchiang Cheng tells Venturebeat that the company will use some of the new cash to launch a basic version of its game on Facebook—although he emphasizes it’s designed to be a marketing channel for the game website.

The funding brings World Golf Tour’s total backing to more than $20 million. The startup had most recently raised a round in the “double digit” millions in May 2008 from Panorama Capital and Battery Ventures. This round is coming from JAFCO Ventures.

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Jacked’s dashboards have primarily been used by sports fans to track stats and player information on their computers while watching live games (The company talked about expanding the dashboards to other types of broadcasts, although nothing seems to have come of those plans). Jacked was founded by former American Greetings (NYSE: AM) Mobile head Bryan Biniak, who is joining Roundbox’s advisory board.

The company had raised about $7 million in funding from Provenance Ventures, Core Capital Partners and Gabriel Venture Partners since its start in 2006. Roundbox, meanwhile, has raised at least $43 million, including $20 million in a third round in December 2008.

Financial terms of the deal were not released.

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The deal is valued at $720 million, including a rights fee and advertising spending, according to the WSJ, which quotes people familiar with the negotiations. NFL fans on the Verizon Wireless network will have access to the popular NFL RedZone channel from the NFL Network, including access to live streaming games on Sunday and Thursday. Verizon will kick off things next month with coverage of the 2010 NFL Draft on April 22. Release.

Sprint reportedly signed a five-year, $600 million deal in September 2005, so either it was not able to renew the deal or did not try to renew the deal. However, the deal has been sweet to Sprint, which packaged it together with its Simply Everything plans, or sold it separately for $15 a month. Sprint said that its NFL Mobile Live app reached 1 million downloads quicker than any other application in the company’s history during the 2008 season, and consistently drove more usage than any other application Sprint offered.

Verizon is not currently saying what phones will be supported or how it will be priced until closer to the start of the NFL season in August.

Other features of NFL Mobile on Verizon Wireless will include:

—Video: Game highlights and a collection of on-demand video, featuring analysis and access to the NFL Network and NFL Films.
—Audio: Live radio broadcasts of every regular season and playoff game from both home and away teams.
—Fantasy: Access to fantasy information, news, and player and team statistics.
—Customizable NFL alerts, ringtones and graphics.

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The application, which is expected to be available Monday on iTunes, will cost $9.99—twice as much as last year’s version that was limited WiFi networks. Rob Gelick, the SVP and GM of CBS (NYSE: CBS) Mobile, expects the demand to be there for live streaming video: “Last year, we were the first to do a live sporting event with the March Madness app, and since then the appetite for video and live video has grown massively for us…We one-upped ourselves. Now people can stay connected regardless of where they are.” [Note: The NBA streamed the All-Star Game live just prior to March Madness in February 2009.]

A free ‘lite’ version, which is sponsored by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), provides on-demand video highlights from every game, live scores, and news coverage. CBS will also launch a free version for BlackBerry, which will be sponsored by Mercedes Benz—but it won’t have live video, or on-demand clips. The only other live video will be available on AT&T’s mobile TV service, which is provided by FLO TV. There fans will be able to get all 63 games. AT&T (NYSE: T) is the Exclusive Wireless Partner of the NCAA , so Verizon Wireless’ similar broadcast TV service and FLO TV won’t have the games. They will have the general basketball coverage that’s found on CBS. The opening round game is March 16.

The paid CBS iPhone app will also provide live radio broadcasts from Westwood One throughout the entire tournament, and push alerts to the phone to let you know if a particular game has gone into over time, or there’s a potential upset on the way. Gelick: “Part of the challenges we had last year, was that there’s all of these great games going on at the same time, which one should you watch?” Both the free and paid apps will have an interactive tournament bracket that updates with real-time scores, plus news and the ability to send comments to both Facebook and Twitter. 

Interestingly, both apps were developed in partnership with MLB Advanced Media, which has built an extensive streaming video platform in-house.

When asked why CBS didn’t produce an Android or Palm (NSDQ: PALM) app, Gelick responded: “Not this year. I think that you try to make sure what you are delivering is world class, and we’ve expanded from last year’s base by almost 2x in terms of the number of touch points. It becomes a scale issue….This is the nicest product we’ve delivered to date.”

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If you compare the online stats, however, the trajectory turns down. The number of video hours served for Vancouver is just about a third of the 9.9 million hours delivered for Beijing—and the number of streams is off by 30 million. Compare it to Torino and Vancouver shows massive gains: 45 million video streams served compared to 8.4 million, 46 million uniques over 13.3 million. It’s not a sleight of hand; the Summer Games traditionally draw a bigger crowd across media and online is no exception.

Plus, NBC only streamed two sports live from Vancouver (curling and hockey) for roughly 400 hours, compared with 2,200 hours of live events from Beijing. Even adding in the 1,100 additional hours of highlights and full-event replay/VOD doesn’t match the amount of video available two years ago. As was the case for 2008, access to live coverage and VOD was limited to pay TV subscribers whose providers made a deal with NBC Sports; this time, NBC said its potential reach covered 95 percent of pay TV households.

NBC could have throttled the numbers up any time it chose by lowering the wall. When access was opened for the USA-SUI match last Wednesday, NBCOlympics.com delivered more than a half-million streams.

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No one is giving official reasons for the switch, which so far is only for these two games, but it’s no secret that NBC Sports landed in the penalty box for Sunday’s misguided call to put the highly anticipated mens’ USA-Canada match on MSNBC, which is not quite fully available in all multichannel households or in HD across all distributors.

Another possible reason: Wednesday’s game was during office hours, as is Friday’s with puck drop at 3 p.m. Eastern. As CBS (NYSE: CBS) Sports already has learned with March Madness on Demand, daytime online for the right events is like prime time. Will NBC follow suit Sunday? If the USA men make the gold medal game, it would be a) criminal b) suicidal c) dense to wall it off. As a longtime hockey fan, I well know the knock about hockey as a “niche” sport in the U.S. That’s not the case for the Olympics.

And it won’t hurt the next time a member of Congress asks NBCU’s Jeff Zucker about closing online access to cable viewers; the subject came up during today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Comcast-NBCU deal and this could look mighty nice in the written response.

Update: NBC just released its most current stats for “NBCOlympics.com on MSN” (the official name) and one stat stands out: the site served nearly 500,000 live streams of the USA-SUI match mentioned above, the highest number of any live event so far. Given that live online has been limited to hockey and curling, that’s not surprising.

— Through 13 days, 28.9 million video streams served, more than 2.5 million hours of video. (Omniture)

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Since Autosport magazine is published in the UK, it often takes a few days to arrive in overseas’ subscribers’ mailboxes. The digital version will, naturally, be available to readers even before the latest issue first hits newsstands. While the e-paper version is a free bonus to current print subs, digital-only subs will have to pay $182.00 (£112.00) for its 51 issues throughout the year. There is currently no monthly tier available. In contrast, a subscription to “Autosport.com plus” costs $8.60 (£5.50) for a month’s access or $74.00 (£46.00) for a year.

Haymarket is currently offering a free sample of the digital issue here. More details in the release as well.

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The internet use, so far, has been more than double the entire 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino. NBCU is also using a single source from Arbitron’s panel for both TV and internet viewing.

—93 percent of those who watched Apolo Ohno’s silver speed skating event never saw it on TV.

—In the men’s short program, 56 percent of those who watched figure skater Johnny Weir watched it for the first time online, while 44 percent watched it on TV first and turned to online video to relive it. “We’ve always thought that internet video viewing is a solitary event, but the research showed us that two-thirds of the people we interviewed said they watched a web video of the Olympics at least once with somebody else, while 16 percent said they regularly watched with others.”

—Mobile: Not only is the growth huge, but it’s mainstreaming. 11 million mobile visits in Vancouver versus 8 million in Beijing. Seven out of 10 who are using mobile now to watch the olympics didn’t use their phones to view the Beijing games. There have been 1.1 million mobile app users to date for the Olympics.

—Simultaneous viewing: Over half have watched TV and used the internet site at the same time. The same percent for mobile.

—Google’s help: Wurtzel touted the research the network is doing with Google? on search results tied to the Olympics broadcast. During the opening ceremonies, NBCU ran a video on TV featuring the song “We Are The World” to promote assistance to the Haitian earthquake victims. Google? searches for the keyword “Haiti” went up 500 percent and remained high subsequently.

—Brand recall: Advertisers who bought Olympics spots both online and offline saw an average boost in brand recall from consumers of roughly 16 percent—versus just buying one or the other.

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How much of the Olympics would be on ESPN’s broadband net ESPN360.com (soon to be rebranded ESPN3)? No commitment to showing all events live online but “a ton of it because, remember on 3, you have infinite screens.” Would he tape delay ski runs for prime time, as NBC has been criticized for doing? “We believe in live. We believe in live.  We just think at this point with technology and people’s expectations and the ability to get instant information, we believe in live.”

Skipper quarrels with the mantra that west coast viewers are willing to have events delayed to get them in prime time. “Every time I hear the discussion about how on the west coast want to watch in prime time, I’d like to know what the question they asked them was. Did they ask them, ‘Would you like us to tape delay it into prime time’ or do they ask them, gee, when do you prefer to watch your big events. Prime time?’ That would be my guess is what they ask. … I’d be interested to know if they asked do you prefer to watch live in early fringe or delayed in prime time? ...  The other comment I would make is, all right, if you’re a sports fan and you really care about the event, you care too much about knowing who won to wait.” (I thought this would come up on an NBCU Olympics research call today.)

When Walsh joined us, Skipper brought him up to speed: “I said we are committed to live.” Here’s an edited version of what followed:

Walsh: “The numbers are there. Just look at it. You can make an argument for it ...”

Skipper: “You can’t make any conceptual argument for it.”

Walsh: “Eventually current events will overcome it and ... It just won’t happen.”

Skipper: “You can’t make an argument that it’s fan friendly.”

Walsh: “No. But the Olympics is a prime-time audience. It’s different.”  For now. “Everybody’s going to be converted to currency because they’re not going to stand for it but I think it’s going to take one more Olympics and then the game will be done. But [NBC’s] not dumb. They’re making calculated decisions about advertising dollars in prime time. That’s what they’re doing.”

Kramer: Let me ask you about this idea that everything has to be watched at an NBC hub.  You can have all the widgets you want, but if you to watch video, can only watch on NBCOLympics.com, etc.

Walsh: “That’s what they bought,. They have a window. We can do replays after 24 hours or something like that.”

Kramer: But I can’t take this moment and put it on Facebook and say, ‘cool moment.’

Walsh: “That’s interesting. Can they do that now?”

Skipper: “Oh, they do it, John. They so efficiently police the proliferation of any video ... Let me address how this affects us. I believe the restrictive manner in which they treat all aspects of the Olympics is very old school and I think, ultimately, not fan friendly. I think ultimately you could generate more interest in the Olympics and Olympic sports if we, for instance, had the opportunity to basically report on it, show videos, get people excited.  At this point, what we have access to is very limited and it’s a very old-fashioned idea.”

Walsh: “You’re arguing that on one side but it is THE question about sports. David Stern became, I think a visionary, when he said, ‘Screw it, we’re going to sell at whatever market rate. We want our game all over the world. We want it everywhere. And I can tell you, boxing was killed by HBO, because boxing said we’re not doing highlights … that’s killed the sport because they became so focused and so linear and so constrained.”

Kramer: It’s bifurcated. If you want to live streaming events or VOD you have to be a paid video subscriber. If you want the highlights, you have to go NBCOlympics.com to watch the highlights. You don’t have to be a subscriber to anything. Is that something you would do?

Skipper:“That sounds pretty smart. One thing they have to do is maximize revenue and that drives everything they’re doing. They believe by time shifting events they can aggregate a bigger audience and sell more ads. They believe by withholding video from everyone else and forcing you to come to NBCOlympics.com they can generate more revenue and here, they’re also generating more revenue. So there’s method to it. It’s not complete madness. It is simply anachronistic.”

Walsh: “The second one is anachronistic. The first one is about to be anachronistic.” (Skipper: “It is anachronistic.”) The first one is not yet because they’re still making a large part of their money on the audiences in prime time. It’s still working. It will be anachronistic.”

Skipper: “You’re right. It’s anachronistic for fans already. It may not be anachronistic for NBC.”

As SVP/GM of NBA Digital, the partnership of Turner Sports and the NBA, Bryan Perez is responsible for NBA TV, NBA.com, WNBA.com, NBADLeague.com, NBA League Pass, broadband and wireless. While the NBA kicked off All-Star Weekend, Perez sat in a red,white, and blue leather recliner in the “living room” section of the NBA TV booth for the paidContent video interview embedded below. We discussed the league’s digital activities; advertising and subscription revenue; the use of social media; its mobile app blitz; and the Turner-NBA partnership. (Look fast during the video and you’ll see TNT’s Ernie Johnson prepping for the live show he was about to do from the open set.) Some highlights:

—Tweet: Players, who aren’t allowed to use social media in game during the season, were encouraged to tweet during the slam-dunk competition. Outside of All-Star, Perez doesn’t see much of an issue about highly paid professionals focusing on the game instead of tweeting.  “While I think it would be neat to have players tweeting during an event, it’s probably more hype than reality, because at the end of the day it’s more hype than reality because at the end of the day it’s all about the game and winning and that’s what makes every other moment that they tweet special and relevant.”

—Repurposing:“We sell League Pass (out-of-market package) separately on television, online and on mobile, It’s a great opportunity for us because we’re basically able to repurpose the same game across every single platform but deliver them in a way that adds value. The ability to get it on your mobile phone is worth something to a fan. We’re always about delivering something that fans really want but also trying to extract some of the value from that.” The most money still comes from television but direct-to-consumer efforts are starting to take shape, including League Pass, mobile apps. D2C is in third place after television and advertising.

—Mobile growth: Before All-Star 2009, the NBA didn’t have a single mobile app. A year later, it has more than 100 across iPhone, BlackBerry and Android. “We have fans. We don’t have iPhone fans or BlackBerry fans.”

—Revenue across platforms: Advertisers “actually pay a lot for ubiquitous brand association ... 28 percent of our advertisers that advertise across all three of our platforms account for 73 percent of or revenue. ... They pay more and they buy bigger because it’s not something they can easily replicate.”

—Video streams: The league passed the half-billion mark for streams just before the All-Star break and Perez expects to hit 1 billion this season through NBA.com. That doesn’t include the new deal with YouTube. Perez: “The YouTube relationship’s only a month old so we don’t have projections for it yet. But we went into this assuming that it was going to be big.”

So, how can both say they’re first? Yahoo and NBC both cite comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) stats that show that Yahoo bested NBCOlympics.com in unique visitors. But NBC says that its site received significantly more page views and also was first in terms of the amount of time visitors spent.

The relevant stats each company wants s to focus on:

—NBC: NBCOlympics.com got 177.4 million page views during the first week of the Olympics, while Yahoo’s Olympics site received 34.5 million. (NBC says its figure is up 244 percent compared to the same period during the 2006 Winter Games in Turin). The company says that on average visitors saw 27.5 pages per visit, while Yahoo visitors looked at 3.8. The average visitor to NBCOlympics.com spent 8.2 minutes on the site to Yahoo’s five minutes.

—Yahoo: Yahoo, meanwhile, notes that its Olympics site had 9.3 million unique visitors during the first week of the Olympics, compared to NBC’s 6.5 million. (ESPN (NYSE: DIS), by the way, had 8.4 million).

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Published for 124 years, TSN is the old-timer among sports publications—and as the most troubled over much of the past 20 years, also the most willing to experiment with new business models. The magazine added a free digital daily edition in 2008 when it slashed its print schedule to bi-weekly monthly.

Charlotte-based ACBJ acquired TSN in 2006 from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Sports Media, expanding sports holdings that include Street & Smith’s Sports Group. Street & Smith’s also publishes the print weekly SportsBusiness Journal and the digital SportsBusiness Daily. SBJ‘s report on Price’s hiring.

Update: Price spoke with paidContent from Charlotte this afternoon. Why TSN? “I think there’s a space in the marketplace that the sporting news can occupy that become very profitable. We don’t have to serve the entire sports universe. ... We don’t have to be all things to all people.” An added benefit for someone who spent the last few years at Time Inc.: it can be done without “hurdles or shackles in terms of what we can do.”

Price knows as well as anyone the rough path TSN has over the past couple of decades. Competition in that sports universe has moved from a constellation of publications at the top and a bunch of niche outlets to a kind of sports media metor shower. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Sports breaks news. Leagues hire sports journalism vets as bloggers and have their own cable networks. Companies like SB Nation are blending professional and user-gen in highly targeted sites. Every platform; every sport.

“There are challenges everywhere in terms of what old-line companies need to do,” said Price. When I asked about blending something like SB Nation with The Sporting News, he complimented Jim Bankoff on what he’s been able to accomplish with the online sports network. “It’s an important part of the overall ecosystem, but probably more of a collaborative relationship rather than us trying to recreate what Jim is doing.” His first focus is working off what’s already been done with the magazine—he described the ‘08 changes as “ahead of its time”—and folding in more of the real-time web.

As for the leagues, Price said he’s already talked to a couple of execs today about finding more ways to collaborate. “We serve a multiple-sport audience and serve them cross season. We can be much more collaborative with the league than competitive.”

Possible acquisitions?: Price led or took part in a number of investments and acquisitions while he was at SI, including the acquisitions of FanNation and Golf.com. Will he be shopping at ACBJ? “I think the reality is we’re going to look at the marketplace really hard. If we see gaps that really need to be filled, buying is one way to get there. But our core
competency is not going to be a tech company.”

Jeff Price is a new addition to paidContent 2010: Discussing the Economics of Content, this Friday, Feb. 19, at TheTimesCenter. He’ll take part in the session The Truth About Subscriptions. Register today.

The network, which expects to lose money on the Vancouver games, is trying a feat as tricky as some of the moves in pairs skating: produce a social media-centric Olympics without allowing video sharing or embedding. Perkins Miller, SVP of digital media for NBC Sports, makes no apologies for the decision. It’s all part of a strategy to make every one of the 17 days count for every second. Key elements include keeping all the video on NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) sites; making highlights freely available; and limiting online access to more than 1,000 hours of video on demand and 400 hours of live competition streaming to users who already pay for video via satellite, telecom or cable.

So far, it seems to be working—although it’s hard to say how much higher traffic might be if users could watch marquee events live online. Through the first two days, the network says NBCllympics.com traffic was up 350 percent from the Torino Winter Games in 2006 with 4.5 million uniques compared to Torino’s 1.02 million. NBC also says the site has delivered 4.5 million video streams, up nearly 700 percent over Torino. (NBC is also using autoplay so it’s hard to know how many of those were initiated directly by users.) No word on how many times the iPhone app has been downloaded but it’s the top free app now (it’s also a featured app, which helps) and had 5.3 million pageviews Saturday, compared with 2 million for opening day.

—Destination NBCOlympics.com : Miller explained the video strategy in an interview from Vancouver as he was preparing for the Games. “The single destination for Olympics video is at NBCOlympics. When you have a 17-day event, we do everything we can to focus everyone’s interest around a single destination. What we found is that people actually like having one place to go and our session times reflect it. People come to NBCOlympics.com. We’ve made sure we’ve got a big front door. We have a partnership with MSN—and their 100 million users—to drive the vast majority of more casual fans into NBCOlympics.com for this period of the games.” NBC still has widgets; it distributed hundreds of thousands of them during Beijing and hopes to distribute another 200,000 or more so people can embed headlines, track medals, and check out thumbnails of video.

—Social media mix: The widgets are one example of how NBC is using social media. It also has partnerships with Facebook and Twitter.  NBC uses Facebook Connect and has a fan page on Facebook. A team is working with Twitter to enhance delivery of tweets to NBCOlympics.com and to push out @NBCOlympics tweets in real time. Miller: “We feel like we’ve made a real connection to the broader breadth of where people are talking or living their lives socially with the content. Having a single destination to bring them back here really is a very simple and easy for users to know where to go, rather than seeing a snippet here or there, which doesn’t tell the full story. When you get back to NBCOlympics.com, you not only will see Lindsey Vonn punch her way through the Super G, then go see her training and how her husband and her prepare for races—all the things that give you another dimension to learn about or care about Lindsey Vonn.”

—Authentication: Users need two things to watch live video streaming—a pay TV subscription and a log in that can be verified. Unlike some authentication systems, they don’t have to be at home to start the process. Instead of ISP access, this version is linked to log-in accounts for the various distributors.  This time around, NBC says that more 95 percent of multichannel households have access to Olympics Online Connect My household subscribes to Charter and DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) (don’t ask). When I tried to log in from my flight between Dallas and St. Louis Saturday, I couldn’t find the magic words for Charter (NSDQ: CHTR). Luckily my DirecTV billing login worked and after a fairly quick process, I was able to watch a series of training runs on the luge. Not everyone I know has it so easy: our editorial producer was asked for her account number and customer code when she tried to access via Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC).

As for video quality, there were some buffering fits and starts but based on some other issues I experienced, that was due to the carrier (GoGo). Access includes live coverage, full event replays and long-form encores. Anyone can watch various highlight packages of the Opening Ceremony at NBCOlympics.com; only Olympics Online Connect provides a full replay.

—NBC Olympics app: As it happens, I saw Swiss ski jumper Simon Ammann’s winning jump on the NBC Olympics iPhone app produced with *AT&T* and MobiTV. The next day, I caught the same on the big screen in HD—a great way to watch but I think I saw the nuances of the jump better on the iPhone app. Athlete tweets are mixed in with event video, updates and medal counts. There’s more than enough video to snack on and the delivery is high quality.

—Plenty of curling: It’s all about perspective. NBC compares the 400-plus hours of competition
being live streamed, including most or all curling and hockey, to the single hockey game streamed as a test during Torino, not the 2,000-plus live hours offered during 2008 from Beijing. Either way, it’s not close to the amount NBC could offer; it has the rights to stream it all. Instead, the focus is more on the HD quality being offered through a video NBC’s partnership with Microsoft’s Silverlight and on the increase in highlights production. “The big learning we had in Beijing was people want those small snacks. They really want to get those singular moments in time; that’s what everybody talks about and that’s what we’re really shouldering the challenge to deliver.”

Related

• NBC Promises Greater Ad Effectiveness With Olympics Research Project
• Vancouver 2010: U.S. Olympic Fans Get Short End Of Live Events Online
• NBC Angry At USOC-Comcast's Olympic Channel; Tried Combining the Efforts
• A Murdoch Olympics? What Will 2016 Olympics Look Like Online

He cautioned against reading too much into the filing, adding: “I am from Michigan and am looking at this. State law requires openness and transparency and that is a good thing.”

Bowman, who has been MLBAM’s CEO since 2000, was the state treasurer under former Gov. Jim Blanchard from 1983 to 1991, and president and COO of ITT Corp. prior to this. He filed as a Democrat, according to the Free Press. If he winds up going the distance, it will be interesting to see how MLB would handle filling his post. Under Bowman’s reign, the digital portion of MLB has grown to be a behemoth, on the backs of its online video subscription service.