News media this week reported next year’s London Olympics will allow athletes to tweet from the Summer Games. In fact, that consent was contained in general guidelines applying to all social media, which were issued to athletes back in May and which themselves are a variant of guidelines issued for…

After years of railing against NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) Sports for its real-time failures, my first instinct when the International Olympics Committee picked NBCUniversal to host the 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 Olympic Games was it could drive online fans crazy. The hefty $4.38 billion price tag, following a $200 million…

London 2012 Olympics organisers aim to make money from their online operations, including capitalising on a domestic commercial straitjacket around the host broadcaster. “It’s part of my department’s mission to be revenue-generating and deliver positive cashflow,” new media head Alex Balfour told the Social Media Influence conference in London on…

“It’s an appropriate time to compare what we’re doing against the World Cup,”  Alex Balfour, the new media head of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games said, presenting these stats to the Social Media Influence conference in London on Tuesday…

NBC Sports rewrites the digital org chart, shifting Perkins Miller to COO, Universal Sports—while leaving him with responsibility for the digital side of London 2012. The rest of the rewrite shows just how layered management is at NBC Sports: Kevin Monaghan, SVP-Business Development, adds Managing Director of NBC Sports Digital…

The data is starting to roll in for the full Vancouver Olympics. NBC (NYSE: GE) hasn’t been to provide some of the stats we’ve asked for—the number of video streams served the night the first USA-CAN hockey match aired on MSNBC against ice dancing, among them. But the numbers we…

U.S. hockey fans needed a pay video subscription to watch the USA-CAN women’s gold medal game online but the men’s victory over Switzerland was barrier-free—and paidContent has learned the Friday men’s semi-final with Finland is likely to follow suit. NBC (NYSE: GE) already has promised to broadcast Friday’s game live…

It’s half-way through the Vancouver Olympics and NBC (NYSE: GE) Universal’s research head Alan Wurtzel already has some findings to share about the viewing results so far. Anticipating the ire of bloggers who have complained that NBCU has been holding back too much live coverage of the games from online,…

It’s no secret that Disney (NYSE: DIS) would like to get another crack at the Olympics and plans to bid for rights to the 2014 and 2016 games.The last time ABC had rights to the Olympics was 1988—before e-mail was ubiquitous, broadband was even a possibility and ESPN was a…

It apparently can’t be an Olympics without dueling claims from both Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and NBC on whose Olympics website is tops. The headline of Yahoo’s release today: “Yahoo Sports Dominates Winter Olympics Traffic.” And here’s NBC’s: “NBCOlympics.com On MSN Leads All Competitors Through First Weekend Of Vancouver Games” (The…

Through some quirks of scheduling, I got my first taste of Olympics action on a laptop through in-flight wireless—not the big screen in our living room—and watched the winning ski jump late at night on demand using the NBC Olympics iPhone app. The 2010 Winter Olympics may not be the…

NBC Universal (NYSE: GE) is bringing back its “total audience measurement index,” or TAMi, for next month’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The company first used the system to track audience viewing data across traditional broadcast and digital a year-and-a-half ago. The audience data initiative, which is headed up by Alan…

Let’s get the credits out of the way first: this February, NBC Sports will stream more than 400 hours of live event coverage on NBCOlympics.com during the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games. That’s an astonishing amount of live video compared to the last Winter Games in Torino when the sum total…

We tend to focus a lot on News Corp.‘s desire to get paid for its online content but the “pay plus ads” refrain is being sung elsewhere in the company, too. News Corp (NYSE: NWS) wants a dual revenue stream for Fox, too—aka retransmission fees. Or, as News COO Chase…

With the 2016 Olympic Games all squared away and set for Rio de Janeiro, members of the International Olympic Committee could get down to more serious business—such as how to handle the issue of online video. WPP Group CEO Sir Martin Sorrell had some very simple ideas for the IOC…

Exactly a year ago CAA announced its biggest bet on sports media, and formed a new unit called CAA Sports Media Venture, as a rollup venture in the sector. But besides hiring Chris Bevilacqua, co-founder of CSTV Networks, as the venture’s CEO, nothing much has happened.  The new unit was…

Shock. Horror. NBC is angry at the new Olympics channel to be launched by USOC and Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), announced yesterday. Yesterday, they declined comment when we asked. Today, Dick Ebersol reveals to NYT that they had on and off talks with USOC for a year about combining their Universal…

That was quick: The United States Olympic Committee announced this morning that it will launch a cable TV network devoted to Olympic and Paralympic Games next year, along with Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) who will carry it in its lineup. Comcast is an equity partner in the channel. And soon after…

Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger has warned the International Olympics Committee Press Commission its media accreditation rules are outdated and must be modernised to allow audience members to report from the Games. “The old means of control don’t work ... “Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future.…