NBCOlympics.com to pass 20 million visits in August

Judgment on August 14, 2008: After an official press release from NBC, this prediction has closed early.  According to the release, NBCOlympics.com surpased 20 million visits in merely 5 days - an incredible achievment.  Judged at 100% - the community was correct.  -- The Industry Standard

NBC has decided to pursue the Herculean effort of streaming the entire Beijing Olympics online.

As io9 puts it, 

"NBC will be broadcasting Olympic events both live and tape delayed on several of the television networks they own, and will also provide on-demand video streams of events on the web. In total, they will present more than 3,600 hours of Olympic coverage. That's more Olympic programming in 2008 than the sum of all the hours of Olympic TV coverage ever."

Of those 3600 hours of coverage, 2,200 hours will be streamed live online at NBCOlympics.com using a custom video player using Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 platform.

While it is safe to assume most viewers will need to download and install the Silverlight browser software to view the video streams properly, the 2008 Olympics should be an absolute boon for NBC online coverage as well Microsoft’s Silverlight brand awareness.

This is a prediction that Compete.com will show NBCOlympics.com will tally over 20 million Visitors (in the drop-down referred to as “Visits – Monthly”) for the month of August, 2008.  NBCOlympics.com received 1.2 million for the month of July, according to Compete.com.  NOTE: There may be a delay in the Compete.com figures being released to the public.  Judgment will be made when that time comes (usually 1-2 weeks).