The London 2012 Olympics are just a few short months away but preparations for the event have been underway for a long time. Today, NBC announced that it had signed a deal with YouTube to provide U.S. coverage of the events. Sports Business Daily reports that as the official Olympics rights holder, NBC's deal with Google's video site will see YouTube provide the video player for NBCOlympics.com for the the duration of the Games.
Previously, NBC has partnered with Microsoft's MSN.com, however, the broadcaster's deal with MSN expired after the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010. Now, for the first time ever, NBC will broadcast all of the events, either live on TV or live streamed online. According to NBC, that's 3,000 hours of live streaming covering all 302 Gold Medals and every event in between. There will also be replays, for those of us that want to sleep at some point during those 17 days.
"We had an opportunity to look at the landscape and ask, 'What is going to work for us?'" Rick Cordella, vice president and general manager of NBC Sports and Olympics digital is quoted by SBD as saying. "YouTube makes sense. They're a young audience, heavily focused on video and they had the technology to pull off a massive amount of video consumption."
YouTube will promote NBC's Olympic coverage heavily on its homepage, pointing people to NBCOlympics.com for more coverage. NBC also hopes to strike social networking deals as part of a larger effort to bring in more young viewers.
