The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have now come to an end, with a spectacular closing ceremony ending the Chinese Games and handing the torch on to London 2012. But did the online coverage of the Games live up to the hype?

Certainly the Web portion of NBC’s offerings didn’t make as much money for the company as it would have liked. But whose fault was that?

$5.75 Million Revenue?

According to The Wall Street Journal, research firm eMarketer Inc estimates that NBCOlympics.com will have generated only about $5.75 million in video advertising revenue for the American television network.

We’ve spoken about video advertising and the difficulty in monetizing Web video a lot here on Web TV Wire, and that difficulty has seemed to rear its ugly head yet again for the Olympics.

NBC paid almost $1 billion to have the exclusive rights for television and video coverage of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games in the U.S. But it seems that it is still losing the battle for viewers with Yahoo.

NBC spent the run-up to the Olympics in China talking up its extensive coverage of the Games.

And with over 2,200 hours of footage being made available online, it certainly had a right to brag.

Technical Issues Galore

Unfortunately, there have been technical limitations and issues surrounding the online coverage. This means viewers not only need to have Vista to watch any footage, but also have no firewall installed on their PC.

Broadcast delays to stop any loss of viewers and advertising from traditional TV have also affected Web viewer numbers, with many finding alternative (and often illegal) methods of watching their favourite event.

Even when viewers do get the chance to watch coverage of the Games on NBC’s site, they are often faced with footage without any kind of commentary, poor quality video, or even an event location but no action taking place.

NBC may have embraced online video for this Olympic Games more than ever before, but its constricted online viewing regime, where certain events are “bottled up” for airing on traditional TV means many fans are being left disappointed.

The event that really showed this lack of respect for viewers was the 100 metres sprint final, a showcase event for as long as the Olympics has been running (a very long time).

Bottled Lightning

Usain ‘Lightning’ Bolt won convincingly, setting a new world record and still having time to celebrate his win in the last quarter of the race, looking left and right, and thumping his chest.

But people using NBCOlympics.com weren’t able to see this landmark event as it was one of the occasions, just like the opening ceremony, where coverage was held up and not shown online until hours later.

While traditional TV may still be the choice of most sports fans seeking coverage of Beijing 2008, there are signs that the Games are acting as something of a trojan horse for online video.

The Olympic Games is proving to be a big hit for the promotion of Web and mobile video, with official figures from the beginning of this week showing that online video traffic for the Games is up massively.

Huge Increase On Monday

Nielsen’s viewing figures for NBCOlympics.com show a huge increase from the amount of people watching on the Internet over the weekend compared to Monday.

This Olympic Games sees the Web competing for viewers with traditional TV for the first time in Olympic history. But will the Internet do as well as hoped?

I had high hopes that the Olympics Games in Beijing were going to be a high point for Web television, and prove that more people are turning to the Internet for coverage than ever before.

While it may be true that Beijing 2008 has more coverage online than any Olympics before it, and that the Web viewing figures are healthy so far, traditional TV is still beating it by a huge margin.

Are the big television networks finally getting a grasp on the digital age and what the Web means for their business? If NBC’s coverage of the Beijing 2008 opening ceremony is anything to go by, they still have a lot to learn.

NBC’s coverage of the Beijing 2008 Olympics has hit piracy issues on the first day of the Games. And it’s all because the TV network decided to delay broadcasting the opening ceremony for 12 hours.

Advertising Revenue Delay

The reason NBC did this was purely down to money - the opening ceremony started at 5am U.S. time, and this just wouldn’t bring in the advertising revenue that a prime time slot of 5pm would.

This kind of strategy would have been fine even just four years ago during the last Olympic Games. But times have changed, and the Web now offers people global access to events like this, live, unfettered, and not dependent on advertisers demands.

The amount of video available on the Web is increasing massively every month, but if metered broadband becomes the norm, don’t expect to be able to watch much of it.

Last Friday saw the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) uphold a complaint against Comcast for blocking BitTorrent traffic. The ISP was ordered to stop P2P throttling, and many other telecommunications companies praised the decision.

First Warning

However, any hope that this would mean metered broadband services would go the way of the dodo are unfounded, and in fact, we’ve now had our first example of a TV company warning customers with metered broadband from accessing its content.