This year's Olympic coverage on NBC really exemplifies the long tail of content.  Every Olympic sport is covered on NBCOlympics.com, you can see the Men's Eight Repechage, the Women's Epee, or the Team Dressage Grand Prix (events that are in rowing, fencing, and equestrian, respectively).  Despite this extreme coverage, NBC is second only to Yahoo.  Yahoo had more unique page views despite NBC's exclusive video content.  Sure to date, NBC has smashed online records that were set at the Athens games in 2004, but what lessons can be learned from NBC's mistakes? 

1) Silverlight
NBC has limited itself somewhat with their Silverlight install (most people don't know how to install a plugin and older Macs will not support Silverlight).   However, many have downloaded Silverlight and it can be viewed as a viable alternative to Adobe's Flash (which this site is built on).  Yet, until Microsoft can embrace an open source community (that which Flex is built on), I think that Silverlight will have a difficult time creating a similar community like that of Flash/Flex. 

2) Lightning Bolt News
News now breaks in Lightning Bolt fast real time.  How frustrating it must have been for people to learn about Usain Bolt's world record 100m and 200m or Jason Lezak's miraculous come from behind catch in the 100m freestyle relay of the French, and not be able to watch.  Well, if you can't watch what you want legitimately, where do you turn?  I was able to find the Bolt record breaking run on YouTube and DailyMotion.  Bad quality but when you can see an amazing performance, that's all that matters.  If only NBC stopped trying to protect their primetime turf, I would have watched this on NBC Olympics.  Oh well.  When will they learn.....

3) TV vs Online 
Thus far, NBC has said that 90% of their traffic has come from television.  Fox (how did they get in here?) says that the numbers come to 99%.  Sure, even I want to see  gymnastics and swimming, but as a former rower, I also want to see rowing.  I think that while NBC knows that there is a long tail market for table tennis, the challenge becomes how they cross promote and what they market to these table tennis aficionados.  What does this prove?  Online is here to stay, it is not going away, but as long as there's no proven revenue model, networks are going to continue to push traffic towards TV.

Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt:  Awesome.  World records and gold medals;  NBC Olympics: not bad for a rookie effort.  I can't wait to see what happens during the next games when we will have Klickable data on all of our athletes in London 2012.