Online video rights clearing house Rightster has brokered soccer highlights represented by MP & Silva to Google’s video website.

The deal creates a new channel, called Love Football, on YouTube, carrying goals and clips from matches in Serie A (Italy), Ligue 1 (France), MLS (U.S.), Serie A (Brazil) and England’s Championship, FA Cup and Capital One Cup.

Asked whether YouTube had put down money for the content, a spokesperson told paidContent:

“This is a traditional partnership similar to the Scottish League coming to YouTube, for example.

“We don’t comment on the specifics of our deals but this content will be ad-supported. YouTube provides the platform for our partners to distribute their content and have robust tools to help manage rights.”

YouTube has historically called itself merely a “platform” for other content owners. But the site has recently shown more interest in leveraging big-brand content like sports…

There is little transparency about the extent of any direct involvement by YouTube in bringing such content to its site, but it is likely trying to bring top-tier sports to its site through partners rather than signing direct deals.

Last month, the Scottish Premier League (SPL) opened a YouTube channel carrying match highlights, exploiting its own rights through the site. YouTube also carries Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket in some countries on behalf of its rightsholder.

Premier puzzle

Regardless of this configuration, the missing piece of the puzzle remains the jewel in football’s crown – the English Premier League, which has previously sued YouTube for allowing unauthorised clips.

Yahoo and ESPN currently hold online and mobile clips rights, respectively, until the end of the just-started 2012/13 season.

The league in June awarded live multi-platform rights for the 2013/14, 2014/15 and 2015/16 seasons to BSkyB and BT, whose combined winning bids of £3.018 billion doubled the previous outlay.

But the Premier League is still yet to unveil winning bids for three outstanding packages – internet clips (including mobile), “near-live” long-form for on-demand and “near-live” long-form for linear. An announcement is expected by October.

How, or whether, YouTube might get the English Premier League remains an open question – but another deal with another partner looks more likely than a direct bid.

Asked, a YouTube spokesperson told paidContent:

“Regarding EPL, as always we’re open to discussions with all partners but we don’t have anything to announce at this point.”

Syndication to YouTube of EPL clips, then, will depend on the outcome of the league’s still-outstanding internet clips auction, which will not come until the autumn at least.

The man leading YouTube’s sports video strategy is Stephen Nuttall, the former commercial director of the EPL’s main live rights holder, BSkyB, who is nowadays YouTube’s senior director of sports for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

We have already reported strong mobile figures from the BBC (a third of web visits, a tenth of video streams) and NBC (16 percent of web users, 45 percent of video requests).

But Balfour’s stats show even higher mobile engagement - 60 percent of visits to the official London2012.com site and apps came from mobile devices.

That ratio is so high partly because the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) had several apps in circulation! As well as the London2012.com websites. But mobile web in isolation took over half of weekend web traffic.

In all, the London2012.com site clocked about three times more users than the BBC Sport effort.

Read on for more official end-of-games data on how London 2012 fared with social media, location-based engagement, email marketing and more…

On the busiest individual days of London 2012, BBC.co.uk served even more traffic than during the whole of the 2012 soccer World Cup, BBC Olympics product head Cait O’Riordan writes (release). That number is 2.8 percent petabytes.

We previewed the BBC’s Olympics online strategy here, here and here. Beside near-day-long coverage across five of its nine linear TV channels, the corporation had cast up to 2,500 hours of live action (every minute of every event) on its website for desktop, smartphone and tablet and through up to 24 simultaneous live streams available online, through internet TVs and via satellite and cable TV.

• An average 9.5 million global daily uniques to the BBC Sport website is almost a quarter higher than the previous record level.
• Video requests were doubled from those seen during any previous event (106 million) – higher than the 2008 games (32 milion) and 2010 World Cup (38 million).
• A third of web visits came from mobile. But only a tenth of video requests were mobile.
• Most interestingly, the majority of video requests (62 million) were for live streams. Only eight million were for on-demand live streams, 35 million were for short-form clips.
• The BBC, which adapts streaming quality to viewers’ bandwidth, says the average bitrate was “the highest the BBC has ever delivered online” at 1Mbps.

O’Riordan:

“Offering everything isn’t enough in the age of multiple devices: our further ambition was to ensure audiences could access our coverage wherever they were, and whenever they wanted it.

“This has really been the multi-platform Games, where audiences have consumed our content across PC, mobile, tablet and connected TV at different times of the day.”

Hourly viewership by platform shows how most usage came from office computers at lunchtime. The newest phenomenon, albeit in line with previously-issued BBC data, is that, despite being a relatively new form factor, tablets accounted for more viewing than any other online medium late at night, as people swiped their iPads whilst watching TV from their sofas and whilst heading to bed.

Mobile and tablet traffic also peaked at weekends. (40 percent of browsers compared with 30 percent on weekdays).

The BBC recently introduced a new web video player for Wimbledon, F1 2012 and the Olympic Games, melding live with catch-up sports. New stats show in-stream chapter markers, allowing live viewers to rewind to key events, were clicked 1.5 million times each day.

Those rights are also held by STV, Perform Group and BBC Scotland. The YouTube deal is not a typical rights deal – YouTube is really just providing its platform for a channel managed by the SPL and populated with its own videos.

That mimics the arrangement under which YouTube, which is becoming increasingly interested in sports video rights, broadcasts Indian Premier League cricket matches around the world.

Could we see YouTube gain English Premier League soccer as well as Scottish?

In England, the Premier League in June awarded live multi-platform rights for the 2013/14, 2014/15 and 2015/16 seasons to BSkyB and BT, whose combined winning bids of £3.018 billion doubled the previous outlay.

But the Premier League is still yet to unveil winning bids for three outstanding packages – internet clips (including mobile), “near-live” long-form for on-demand and “near-live” long-form for linear. An announcement is expected by October.

If Google goes for anything, it would be the internet clips, currently held by Yahoo (the existing mobile package is held by ESPN). Bidders are likely to include Perform Group and ESPN, which has lost lucrative live rights.

If it paid money to the league, Google could cure court action the league has taken against YouTube in the U.S. for allowing unauthorised YouTube clip uploads. But observers shouldn’t expect a bid…

Whilst the EPL has an array of suitors, the SPL’s YouTube deal is motivated by trying to secure a wider audience for its product, which some consider sub-standard and devalued by the loss of its number-two club, Rangers, to relegation following financial insolvency. A big motivator for the SPL is that its YouTube highlights can be viewed globally, not just at home in Scotland.

Whilst the SPL tells paidContent it never gives its matches away for free, it’s hard to imagine the EPL giving its away for anything other than maximum value  - maximising audience may prove a lesser concern.

The way the SPL structured the deal with YouTube allows Google to go on being a platform rather than a content owner. That may rule YouTube out of a full-on bid for English Premier League rights.

But it would, no doubt, love to get its hands on legal Premier League video in any way it can. YouTube now has a senior director of sports for Europe, Middle East and Africa – Stephen Nuttall, the former commercial director of the EPL’s main live rights holder, BSkyB.

Google on Tuesday published data showing the largest share of searches for “Paul McCartney”, as his performance closed out London 2012′s opening ceremony, came from smartphones…

Strung out over the games’ first two whole days, Google’s data shows desktop regaining the majority of search share for Olympics-related queries; only Japan saw the majority of searches from handsets…

Evidently, mobiles and tablets pull the strongest audiences at night and around large events. Dai Pham and Adam Grunewald of Google’s mobile ads marketing team write:

“We see these trends in many multi-screen events (such as the Super Bowl, Oscars, and Eurovision). But the Olympics represents an even more pronounced trend and one we can see happening at a global level.”

Ahead of the games, three quarters of IAB and Mojiva survey respondents (U.S. and UK) said they would follow their country’s Olympic team via mobile in some way. Half said they would do so whilst watching TV.

Although both NBC and the BBC are broadcasting multiple simultaneous live events on the web, the BBC is also pushing those streams out through up to 24 new channels to living-room TVs.

Seventeen million people have used this BBC “Red Button” to watch those streams for at least 15 minutes over the last week, the corporation says.

That means around a quarter of the UK population has delved beyond primary linear TV, toward narrowcast live sport.

What does this tell us about the nature of live, prime-time, linear broadcasting versus narrowcasted alternatives… ?

1. Super-serving slices thick

Firstly, whether they are carrying high-profile or esoteric, little-supported events, all 24 of those channels are being used…

Every one of the 24 channels has seen 100,000 users at some point, according to BBC Sport and London 2012 product head Cait O’Riordan. Although the sheer breadth of simultaneous options might have diluted the audience for each, it appears to have held steady – 100,000 is a considerable audience for narrowcast events.

2. Even bigger than the web

In the same period, the BBC Sport Olympics website has clocked up 18 million unique browsers, peaking at eight million from the UK. That means more UK viewers are engaging with their living-room Red Button than with the website.

The web has become acknowledged as the uber catch-up, choice and depth platform. Audiences just hadn’t yet appeared conditioned to expect, on their TV, the same number of choices presented online…

But the BBC is blurring the platforms. Although all 24 BBC Olympics live streams are being streamed on the BBC’s website, the same IP streams also arrive on the BBC’s Virgin Media and connected TV Red Button platforms.

3. Narrowcast is surviving broadcast onslaught

The BBC has devoted excellent blanket coverage to the Olympics. Three of the UK’s primary linear channels – BBC One, Two and Three – have all but shelved their daytime and evening schedules in place of live events, analysis, interviews, highlights and magazine features. There may be enough material being pumped out of these core channels to satisfy anyone – even those who have missed an event are likely to find highlights looping around any minute now.

But that makes the 24 streams’ performance even more impressive, proving that there is always a passionate audience wanting to go deep, no matter how niche the interest.

4. UK mobile viewing matching U.S.

Last week, an under-pressure NBC said 45 percent of its Olympics IP video streams were to mobile and tablet devices. BBC figures show a similar ratio, with a combined 41 percent. It is fascinating to see mobile viewing consistently high in two entirely different timezones…

Defending itself against this week’s “#NBCFail” criticism, NBC on Thursday revealed stats from its first five days online video streaming. NBC research president Alan Wurtzel told journalists:

• “Nearly 28 million people have visited NBCOlympics.com – eight percent higher compared to Beijing.”
• 64 million total video streams served across all platforms – 182 percent increase over Beijing
• Served 5.3m hours of live video – already “surpassed the total of all the games we streamed in Beijing”.

That website traffic growth is minimal for a four-year time advance. The biggest revelation is in mobile and video specifically…

• 60 percent of video streams are happening “online” (ie. desktop web), “another 45 percent is (from) a combination of tablet and phones“, Wurtzel said.
• “Nearly 4.6m people have gone to the mobile site – double the number from Beijing.
• “Apps for mobile have consistently been among the top five apps in the app store since the games began, and have been downloaded more than six million times.”

Of course, not much of this is necessarily a surprise in growth terms. Some of these devices (ie. tablets) didn’t even exist four years ago; smartphones were around but are now commonplace, pushed in to many more owner’s hands by the Android boom and general adoption growth.

But the ratio of mobile viewing amongst the total is interesting.

“Sixty percent of Americans don’t even work in an office,” Wurtzel said. “A lot of those folks are going to be watching on mobile for the first time”.

That so many of the streams are viewed whilst portable - most likely during day time – may be a happy fact for NBC. A natural consequence of this may be to gather the largest audience on users’ best screen – their TV – during the evening.

There is one looming challenge. Right now, most internet streams are to dedicated mobile devices and to the web. In another four years, internet video to living room TVs will be commonplace. Internet-connected TVs present an opportunity to super-serve audiences with copious live coverage – but broadcasters may be disallowed from streaming to “TV” in this way by their cable partners.

“We’ve had some challenges,” NBC Sport chair Mark Lazarus conceded. “They’ve been documented by some of you and some of our critics in social media. Some of it is, in fact, fair and we are listening. We knew it wouldn’t be perfect and we said that before the games – we are trying new things.”

Prime-time loves spoilers:

NBC, whose merger partner Comcast ranks #26 in this year’s paidContent 50 list, has been ridiculed online for holding back live events for U.S. prime time whilst online chatter and news reports give away results to online users. But NBC research president Alan Wurtzel said results of a 1,000-viewer survey conducted on Sunday showed:

“Forty-three percent said they’d heard about results of Olympic events … but they said they were more likely to watch the prime time coverage that night than those who hadn’t.”

Wurtzel said a second survey showed:

“Viewers who streamed live events on Saturday were nearly twice as likely to watch the prime-time broadcast, and spent 50 percent more time watching that those who didn’t stream.”

Still, NBC aims to try harder not to spoil its own coverage, after some company tweets gave away event results. ”We’re learning as we go here,” Lazarus said. “We meet every morning to go over what we’ve learned. We’re talking about tweaking the timings and how we push out.”

NBC digital stats:

Wurtzel presented stats showing 64 million total video streams served across all platforms, while regular TV viewing has outperformed NBC’s Beijing games for six consecutive nights, Wurtzel said, suggesting it is benefitting from a halo effect from other platforms. See the full online viewing breakdown.

‘Minority’ see ‘fail’:

NBC is streaming all of the games at NBCOlympics.com.

But has variously been mocked for tape delays, replacing sensitive opening-ceremony scenes with commercials, poor commentary, for the website requiring cable authentication and for Twitter temporarily suspending a user for tweeting an NBC executive’s email address.

Lazarus defended:

“Everyone has got the right to have their point of view. The overwhelming majority of the people are voting with their clickers, fingertips and mousclicks and saying ‘we enjoy what you do’.

“We listen to (the criticism of a) very loud minority. But the silent majority has been with us for the last six days.”

The defense, of course, exposes the overarching importance of television’s old prime time advertising slot in an emerging IP world that, at least to fans who care enough, has so much more potential for real-time immediacy.

Old and new

Lazarus drew attention to NBC’s online Olympics commitment, enhanced from Beijing:

“No one’s ever done this much simultaneous live streaming before.  We are doing a lot of experimentation, we will continue to do that. We are mixing tradition and innovation.

“There are so many events going on, you physically cannot do everything live. All the events are available through the streaming to cable customers – that’s 90 percent of the consumer base.

“We’re archiving the best of these live events for our prime time show – that’s traditional – (pulling out the) story arcs. The Olympics is so much more than a sporting event.

“Not everyone is going to be happy – but it’s clear (viewers) are coming in droves and staying night after night. We believe we’re doing everything we can to satisfy the majority of our viewers – the results bear out.”

He made non-specific reference to how things might change in future: “By 2020, the one thing we know for sure is that the media’s going to change.” But the bigger change, fortunately for NBC, is that the next games, in Rio, will be on a more accommodating time zone.

“Rio will be live,” Lazarus said. “Sochi (2014 Winter Olympics), we’ll have to wait and see where they schedule the events and what time that translates to here. Our preference is live in prime time where we can.”

In a 24-hour world, it seems 8pm-to-11pm is still where the money is. Lazarus said NBC, which had initially forecast to lose $200 million on the Olympics, will do far better:  ”We’ve made significant incremental money and will now be around breakeven. There’s a small chance we could make a little bit of money – we’ll know over the next few weeks.”

During Olympic cycling road races this weekend, television broadcasters say they were let down by a lack of official timing data supplied by the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS). One BBC commentator relied on his own stopwatch.

IOC communications director said (via Guardian.co.uk): “From my understanding, one network was oversubscribed, and OBS are trying to spread the load to other providers.”

Adams did not name the underperforming network. And his plea to tweeters, in the circumstances, goes against the social media project the IOC had tried to create: “We don’t want to stop people engaging in this by social media and sending updates, but perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates.”

What constitutes an “urgent” Olympic tweet is anyone’s guess. But the request is ironic in light of the IOC’s own social media commitment. That Twitter has undone coverage in this way is even more delightfully ironic for those onlookers who enjoy comparing the relative fortunes of each medium. Unlike the TV data issue, consumers do not yet appear to have experienced mobile signal issues during the games.

The UK’s five main mobile carriers had banded together with the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) to plan out 3G signal requirements around London well in advance.

“The demands that will be placed on the networks will be like having four royal weddings per day for 17 consecutive days,” Stuart Newstead, chair of the Mobile Experience Group, which represents TV and internet broadcasters and mobile networks at the games, told Bloomberg. “Like any of the athletes, we’ve prepared as well as we could and whatever happens, happens.”

Before the games began, I asked each network their plans to guarantee sufficient coverage – here’s what they said…

Everything Everywhere (Orange and T-Mobile):

“We’ve been preparing for London 2012 since before Orange and T-Mobile merged to become Everything Everywhere (mid-2010), investing millions of pounds to ensure a good experience for both British and international visitors to the Olympics…

“Our network specialists have looked to previous global and national events, and analysed sites around the UK where we expect additional demand over the course of the Summer – including tourist attractions, transport hubs and sporting venues, and upgraded hundreds of key sites to cope with additional demand.

“We’ve also increased measures in place to maintain service and operational stability during the games. Additional field maintenance resource in the areas of the country most affected are in place, alongside dedicated incident managers to ensure a very rapid response time to any service-affecting incidents.

“The Joint Operators Olympic Group (JOOG) is also providing as much capacity as possible using external mobile base stations in the Olympic Park to support the number of visitors expected each day. The operators have built 30 sites across the Olympic Park including 14 in-building solutions. At off-park venues, a further 17 temporary sites are being provided to add additional capacity.”

O2:

The company referred us to COO Derek McManus’ September 2011 blog post, in which he said:

“As an industry, we have been planning for over two years and O2 alone has invested £50m in London 2012 – increasing capacity on the current network and building new temporary sites across the country. The mobile industry is expecting to cater for 80 million mobile phone users in 100 different event locations.”

Vodafone:

“We are investing in excess of £1.5 million per day in our network this year and have weighted that investment towards the first half of 2012 in preparation for a busy summer.

“We have accelerated network upgrade and deployment work and are in the process of optimizing our network in London to ensure our customers have a great experience. We are also putting in place extra coverage in public spaces such as Hyde Park and other areas where we know there will be a large number of people.

“We expect to see high demand for all services during the Games as more and more customers use smartphones to access the internet and social network sites. On an average day, we handle upwards of 45TB (terabytes) of data, 90 million calls and 155 million texts. Obviously we are expecting a significant increase on that level of demand, but we are experts in forecasting demand and optimizing our network – in real time – to cope with high usage.

“We have an elite team of engineers dedicated to preparing for special events. Recently, for instance, they ensured that visitors to London were able to call, text, tweet and upload pictures during the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations.

“Meanwhile, our Network Operations Centre (NOC) at our headquarters in Newbury gives us real-time visibility of traffic and enables our team of engineers to dial up capacity when and where we need it. For example, on New Year’s Eve 2011 our network was comfortably handling 12,000 texts a second and we saw well over a million people log on to Facebook, through their phones, in the space of a couple of hours. Volumes of texts were up 25% from the previous year, as was data traffic.

“We’ve also been working with our colleagues in New Zealand and South Africa to take on board the experiences from other recent large-scale worldwide sporting events.”

Three:

“We have worked in partnership with JOOG (Joint Operator Olympic Group) to build additional and dedicated capacity at the Olympic venues in London and across the country. This work has coincided with our on-going network improvement programme both in the capital and UK-wide

“We’ve upgraded sites at around 500 different locations and have also upgraded most of our sites nationally to the very latest and quickest 3G technology (HSPA+). Later this summer, we will move to Dual-Carrier HSDPA equipment, potentially doubling the speed customers can currently get.

“In addition, we have been busy installing Ethernet backhaul across our entire network to ensure that the cables which carry traffic from sites to our core network are not only quicker than ever before, but have more capacity both now and in the future.”

Team GB (AKA the British Olympic Association) will debut two of its own new digital products next Monday – a “Team GB Live” mobile and web app to give fans customisable real-time data, and a fan gallery that is intended as a digital legacy project.

Team GB digital marketing manager and online editor Joe Morgan told me, in a video discussion at Team GB House on the Olympic Park:

“In previous Olympics, the power has been in the broadcasters to tell the fans what they should consume.

“This is the first Olympics where we see the power of the fans to decide what they want to know about.”

Several of the Games’ key stakeholders have each been building their own online and social products to engage and inform fans…

• For instance, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is making a song and dance about social.
• Aside from its London2012.com website, the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) has debuted the “official results app”, also packing results tables, news and advertising.

As they do so, they risk pushing out overlapping propositions. But do they also replicate the traditional role of media in giving information and data to sports fans?

IOC communications director Mark Adams told paidContent:

“We have become a content producer in a way that we never were before.

“I don’t think that’s a bad thing – it doesn’t threaten you guys in any way – it’s complementary, if anything.

“In the old days, 20 years ago, the split between the organiser and the IOC was very clear – they did they national stuff and we did international stuff – you can’t do that anymore.”

Team GB’s focus is purely domestic and centred on relationship-building, Morgan said:

“This is going to be the first games told in 140 characters. There’s going to be so much noise out there that we really want to focus on what’s happening from a GB perspective – our role is not just from an athlete perspective but also a fan engagement perspective.”

Each organisation sees their online efforts as complementary to, rather than competitive with, broadcaster and publisher digital output. But it is often the case that “media” companies are disintermediated by groups which don’t see themselves as media companies.