NBC Olympics Online Video Consumption is Rising Fast, Nielsen Reports

Despite the grumblings from some media critics and bloggers over the weekend about the selective delays by NBC around the distribution of online video coverage of the Summer Olympics, the depth and quality of the online video offering is astonishing.  There is quite a lot live and mostly everything else is up on demand.

Nielsen just release information on traffic to Olympics-related sites.  NBC had over 4 million uniques on Saturday.   Traffic to the NBC Olympics video page has doubled from Thursday to Friday to nearly 850,000.  Below is the chart of visitors this past weekend.   

Here the number for visitors to NBC Olympics video page, it does not represent the number of streams:

 

We will be publishing more interviews with Microsoft's Eric Schmidt today -- he's the guy heading of the streaming integration between MSN and NBC Sports.  Below is video of Eric's tour of the MSN Olympics site.  We published this last week.

The Wall Street Journal has a story up about the Olympics and online and offline video numbers. 

-- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer