This year's Web coverage has been heavily influenced by NBC's experience during the Sydney Games, undertaken in partnership with Quokka Sports, which has long since joined the dot-com boneyard. NBCOlympics.com, produced by Quokka for the Sydney Games, was elaborate and contained extensive original reporting on each event. There were about 200 news stories on track and field alone. Those investments did little to attract online viewers, however. Internet researcher Jupiter Media Metrix registered relatively scant traffic to the Quokka site, calling it a "non-event" on the Web. "The beauty and downfall of Quokka was that they built beautiful, cutting-edge Web sites. The bad news is that those sites were all hand-built -- you needed a small army of people to handle them," said Kevin Monaghan, vice president of business development at NBC Sports. Producers of the site said that its Achilles' heel was a lack of live event coverage. The IOC put strict guidelines on what materials could be presented on the Internet. The biggest restriction was on video because of fears that the global nature of the Web would undermine broadcast rights in various countries. As a result, coverage of the Summer Games in Sydney was tape-delayed, giving US audiences little to no real-time view of the Games. A small amount of live footage ran on Quokka's Olympics site via a small application approved by NBC, but the coverage was limited. Quokka also didn't have credentials to attend and report on the games live, nor did any Web publisher. The shakeout left a bad taste in the mouths of some former Quokka executives, who said online Olympics coverage has been in retreat ever since. "Two years ago, we were trying to understand what it would be like when convergence (of TV and the Internet) would happen," said Michael Gough, former vice president of creative at Quokka and now vice president of brand design at Nike. "But now, it's about informational content for the medium. "One could argue (the Olympics online) is taking steps backward every two years," he said. With MSNBC hosting the events, reporting will be more automated, making it simpler and cheaper, according to producers of the site. Only about 70 people work on the two official Web sites this year, compared with more than 300 who worked the Quokka-produced NBCOlympics.com site during the Sydney Games. IBM hosted and produced the official Olympics.com site last year. "The real eureka to me about the Internet is that more isn't necessarily better. You can do things a lot smarter and people won't notice," said Tom Feuer, coordinating producer for the Internet at NBC Sports. Despite the light budget, MSNBC projects Web traffic will be much higher than that for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. Organisers are forecasting up to 20 million unique visitors worldwide to the official sites this year. In comparison, NBCOlympics.com drew 4.4 million US visitors during the Sydney Games, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. "It could get up into hundreds of millions of page views," said Steve White, chief technology officer for MSNBC. "The ceiling would be a billion page views, and that's probably a high-end projection." Analysts predicted that future Games is likely to see a further expansion of online coverage, particularly as the IOC takes steps to authorise online broadcasting. This year, for example, it approved a test by Television Suisse Romande, a Swiss-based broadcast rights holder, to stream video and audio over a closed DSL (digital subscriber line) network in Switzerland. The video will reach less than 2,000 homes and will be the only competition footage to air via the Web. "We're on this path to what the Olympics coverage will look like; it will truly be a convergence event," said Allen Weiner, a principal analyst at NetRatings. "The TV and Web experience will be in the same box. You'll be able to have some sort of Web experience like buying the official toboggan of the US team while watching live coverage. "But we're still a couple of Olympics away from that," he said. News.com's Joe Wilcox contributed to this report.
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