Yet again, the traditional media industry has failed to capitalize on the business opportunities available with new media. According to TechCrunch’s sources:

… eMarketer put out [an estimate] on Friday that NBC’s Olympics video ad revenues came to only $5.75 million. That compares to $23 million that CBS made from video ads when it streamed the NCAA basketball tournament live on its Website in March. … NBC paid $900 million for exclusive video rights to the Olympics, meaning that its [TV advertising] profits will be about $100 million.

It is unknown how much of this $5.75 million revenue is actually profit.

Around the internet/blogosphere, this small showing has been attributed to many things, including NBC’s usage of Microsoft’s Silverlight technology (a new technology in the already Adobe Flash-dominated web video market) that is not browser-agnostic, as well as its restrictive scheduling and content exclusivity. And while these are not “life-or-death” obstacles, obviously these are purely business decisions without any input from the customer. Based on the accounts I’ve read and my own experiences, people would most likely want a seamless experience using the technology they already have and the ability to watch truly live streaming video rather than having to wait until after the TV broadcast for replays. And when you take into account the “Web 1.0″ style of content exclusivity, NBC has fallen again behind the times.

From strictly a design standpoint, I believe NBC missed the boat on this one due to poor information design. The designers of the site payed little attention to the Information Architecture of its content, providing many duplicative (and therefore confusing) navigation paths throughout the site. As I clicked through the site in what I believed was a linear pattern, it turned out the website was constantly jumping me from section to section without a steady anchor as to where I was at any moment (or how to get back to where I came from). Granted, this is not an easy problem due to the complex multi-dimensional nature of the content (which could be possibly navigated by sport, country, athlete, date, etc), but I can’t believe NBC came up with the best solution. I’m sure many people, like me, never got that far on NBCOlympics.com as I was quickly overwhelmed by the site’s Information Overload. And this doesn’t even take into account the video content which surprised me by how many pages I had to go through to play a video after I actually found the one I wanted. Overall I left the site after 10 pages or so of finding nothing I was looking for (and only what NBC’s editorial team was pushing).

Unfortunately this can only be bad for the consumers in the long run, as NBC (and other similar business) will only see this as a proof of a bad market, rather than fixing the root of the problem by meeting that market’s needs.