• Ad Age, Monday, November 6, 2006 11:45 AM

For the Beijing Olympics in 2008, you can go to China to see the games live or you can just turn to NBC. As NBC Universal gets ready to begin a new round of negotiations, it will offer the first real-time coverage of the games, streaming up to 1,000 hours online.

In addition, NBC has finally persuaded the International Olympics Committee to schedule two of the most popular sports--gymnastics and swimming--when the network can broadcast live in prime time in the U.S. Dick Ebersol, NBC Universal Sports & Olympics chairman, says: "We're not prepared to make the hard announcement, but we'll be in a position to live-stream between 800 and 1,000 hours of coverage in addition to 800 hours on cable and 200 hours on the network."

NBC Universal has not decided which streams to use, although NBCOlympics.com is where it usually places Olympic highlights. No decision has been made about whether the streams would be ad-supported or via subscription.

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