Steve Ferguson woke up early on Friday — 3 a.m. to be exact — to watch his stepdaughter Margaux Isaksen, a 16-year-old Olympian, complete a grueling 11-hour performance in the modern pentathlon.
Ferguson did not watch Margaux compete in person. From his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, he watched a live stream of her sport on NBCOlympics.com, where 2,200 live hours of the Summer Olympics were shown for Internet users.
The ratings for NBC’s television coverage of the Games were record-breaking this month. But the extent to which the Internet served as a supplement to television was unprecedented, and there were two clear winners: NBC’s own Web site and Yahoo’s Olympics section.
Benefiting from the growth in broadband Internet access, NBCOlympics.com served up more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million video streams through Saturday, more than doubling the combined traffic to its site during the 2004 Games in Athens and the 2006 Games in Turin. The popularity of the site will very likely make digital rights more significant in next year’s bidding for the 2014 and 2016 Games.
As this Olympics demonstrated, the Internet turns the action into a digital version of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books, where every sport can receive its time in the spotlight. Enjoy cycling? NBC had 90 videos of the competitions by Sunday. Prefer softball? Yahoo had 186 photos.
The Internet is “allowing people to create their own broader Olympics experience,” said Jon Gibs, the vice president for media analytics at Nielsen Online.
During previous pentathlons, Ferguson would sometimes have to wait until a Wednesday to see Margaux’s performances from the prior weekend.
“It’s really nice to have this available,” he said of the streaming video, even though his connection at home was somewhat slow.
NBC, as the holder of U.S. rights to the Olympics, was the sole source for online…