TV

Think the Summer Olympics in Beijing are going to be a big deal? NBC, which paid $1 billion for the broadcast rights, certainly does. How big? Try "the single most ambitious media event in history" in the words of Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports and Olympics. Or, in the words of NBC's Olympic primetime host, Bob Costas, "uber-spectacular."

Start with the amount of coverage -- 3600 hours, more than the combined total of every other Olympics televised in the U.S., starting with the 20 hours CBS devoted to the first Olympic broadcast in 1960.

In a cutting-edge exercise of multimedia programming, all those hours are going to be spread across television, computers and mobile devices, and all are going to be broadcast in high-definition.

"That's probably the biggest technical innovation," Mr. Ebersol said, speaking by satellite from Beijing. At the last Olympics (in Salt Lake City) only five sports and the opening and closing ceremonies were in high-def. They were boutique presentations. Now every camera we're using, including the lipstick cams that will show you the arrows landing in the archery competition, will be high-def.

The other change that may mean even more to viewers -- considering that according to NBC astatistics, 95 percent of Americans still use standard televisions -- is that the majority of coverage will be live. In stark contrast to previous NBC-broadcast games, viewers will see what happens as it happens, as when, over the first eight nights, swimming events will be shown during primetime. Gone is the "plausibly live" approach of previous Olympic broadcasts when NBC would hold back events and package them for a primetime audience, showing them hours after they had happened and, in this evermore wired world, results were widely known.

One reason for the emphasis on live coverage is viewser frustration. "We've learned our lesson," Mr. Ebersol said.

Another reason is that China, though halfway around the world, is, conveniently, 12 hours ahead of New York -- mid-morning there is primetime back home. With all those high-def cameras and all that "cross-platform content" -- streaming video on nbcolympics.com, updates broadcast to cell phones, and , of course, all the coverage televised on NBC and its cable counterparts -- it's easy to understand why the Olympic mantra at NBC is "whenever, wherever, any hour, every hour."