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NBC, the Olympics, and Intel's new Viiv platform

The 2006 Winter Olympics start tomorrow, and while NBC is pushing out coverage to six channels at all hours of the day, it will be hard to keep up on all the action (update: here is a link to the full US TV coverage).

NBC is doing a couple things to help fans keep up. One is Video On Demand. My Comcast HD DVR finally got the "On Demand" service enabled this week, and I have to admit that after years of not finding VOD very interesting, having a bunch of free movies and sports programs ready to go is a nice addition. NBC has already loaded up the sports VOD section with Olympics previews -- but more importantly NBC is promising at least a 10 minute daily highlight reel and hours of extra coverage will also be available on demand, available on DirecTV, Dish, Time Warner, Comcast, and Charter systems.

NBC has also partnered with Intel, to show off Intel's new Home Media platform called Viiv, and they are offering downloadable video segments to customers with a Viiv setup. The technology is slated mostly for high-end home theater PCs (at around $2,000 and up), and the site is short on details (it looks like yet another whole home PC concept), but this BusinessWeek article describes it a sort of metadata-rich internet video suite, offering easy playback of specific video segments, web links, and additional info about shows. It sounds like simply a high-end HTPC specification, so perhaps anyone with Windows Media Center can also get the highlight clips.

It seems like NBC is starting to dip their toe into internet and on demand Olympics video, but it'd be nice if they'd take more ambitious steps and sell full coverage of specific events on say, the iTunes Music Store. I'd happily pay $1.99/each to see just the 3 or 4 events I'm interested in.

by Matt Haughey February 9, 2006 in News

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