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London Olympics Already an Online Streaming Success for NBC

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NBC has finally released stats on its online Olympic efforts, and it has much to be pleased about. So far, NBC's Olympic hub -- NBCOlympics.com -- has served over 102.6 million video streams, and that's with 6 days of events remaining. The entire Beijing Olympics resulted in 75.5 million streams.

The number of live video streams currently stands at over 45 million, which is triple the number from Beijing (14 million).

That shows that requiring pay TV registration to access the live video streams was not a significant hurdle to viewers. NBC's decision to require a pay TV account for live video access is still a controversial one.

Paradoxically, the success of NBC's live online video may be boosted by the unpopularity of NBC delaying key events to show in prime time on television. While the most popular events aren't streamed live on the website, either, the site allows viewers to view thousands of hours of live coverage, most of it without distracting commentary. Indeed, NBC's online video is the alternative to NBC's broadcast video.

NBCOlympics.com earned over 1.1 billion page views so far, so it's almost reached the 1.2 billion page views that the Beijing site received. The most popular Olympian, NBC notes, is Gabby Douglas, who received 18.27 million views. Michael Phelps was second with 7.04 million page views, McKayla Maroney third with 6.04 million, Jordan Wieber fourth with 5.94 million, and Aly Raisman fifth with 3.01 million.

Finally, NBC notes that viewers are clicking to the site and staying for a long time. The average visitor spends 27 minutes on the site, a 118 percent improvement over Beijing. 

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