Imagine trying to binge all 11,000 hours of broadcast video from the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics. It would take more than 458 sleepless days and nights to see all 329 medal events and three dozen sports. It also would require that you didn’t get distracted by the 25,000 social media posts from official Summer Olympics accounts.
There’s no question that the amount of content generated by the Games has exploded over the years. In 2012, the Olympics produced 5,600 hours of video — half of what’s planned for this year. The advent of streaming and the expansion of video-based social media have spurred a visual bonanza that has altered how billions of people around the planet watch competition on the world’s largest stage.
“Like so many things, it’s an additive model,” said Josh Jackson, assistant director of media studies at UC Berkeley. “At the macro level, Peacock didn’t replace cable. Cable didn’t replace broadcast. The internet didn’t replace traditional television. They’re all working together to collect audiences through their favorite means of accessing content and then attempting to move audiences from one platform to the other.”
Jackson said the spectacle of this year’s Summer Olympics is as much a story about curated online content, high-tech video and gold medals as it is about groups like NBCUniversal working to satisfy stakeholders by drawing enormous audiences to its coverage of athletics’ biggest stage.
Capitalizing on the attention of roughly half of the global population will look very different now than it did even a decade ago. In the U.S., it means NBCUniversal will run the show — or rather, an endless stream of them.