• Silicon Alley Insider , Tuesday, August 5, 2008 12:15 PM

NBC, through its unprecedented Internet coverage, will be broadcasting the Olympics on a larger scale than ever before. Even so, Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget says, the company is still producing the content "for themselves and their legacy TV business, not you."

How so? If NBC really cared about providing the best coverage of the Games, Blodget says it would make NBCOlympics.com a comprehensive on-demand directory of all events, searchable by day or event. For those events that the network isn't covering, NBC could link to a partner company's video, giving partners access to their video in return. Instead, NBC will describe what each of its partner networks will show on any given day and time.

"Hate to break it to NBC," says Blodget, "but viewers couldn't care less which network they watch on. They just want to know how/where to watch the events they want to watch. So this thinking should be inverted." He also adds that NBC should be making NBCOlympics.com a Wikipedia-style start page for the Games, instead "of the me-too 'Olympics' destination" it already is. "As it is," Blodget says, "we suspect we'll spend most of the Olympics cursing NBC for forcing us to watch the Olympics according to their schedule and style, not ours."

Read the whole story at Silicon Alley Insider »