As the torch heads closer to Salt Lake City for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, organisers and broadcasters once again fear they will be burned by the Net.
Already, online troubles for the games are mounting on several fronts, with one Internet company scheduled to cover the event collapsing and another backing out of its contract to run the official Web site.
Organisers, meanwhile, continue to grapple with tricky questions about how to balance online and traditional media coverage without alienating companies that have paid billions of dollars for exclusive TV rights. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) offered press credentials to only a few Internet news outlets - a policy that angered some companies that were passed over.
"We're all media, we're all covering different events from different angles," said Joe Ferreira, vice president of programming at CBS SportsLine, a sports site that so far has been denied access to the games.
To date, Web companies seeking to provide online coverage of the games have faced a tough road.
Sydney Games
During last year's Summer Games in Sydney, Web reporters were shunted from the Olympic playing field, leaving online news organisations dependent on stories produced by traditional media wire services.
Forrester Research analyst Eric Scheirer, who wrote a report titled "No Gold for These Online Olympics," criticised such policies as shortsighted.
"NBC worries that Internet viewing would cannibalise its TV audience and jeopardise its ad deals," Scheirer wrote. "But this protectionist stance is misguided. Internet distribution can effectively complement televised coverage - and attract its own audience and attendant revenues."
Olympic organisers say they are warming to Net initiatives.
"The time is ripe, possibly even late, for Internet credentials and including the Internet as a media," said Bob Condron, a spokesman for the US Olympic Committee. "We need to get them as a part of our family now so we can figure out where we want to go."
Nevertheless, the IOC has yet to fully open the games to online companies.
In a conference held in Lausanne, Switzerland, last December, the IOC brought together the sports community and the leaders of the new and traditional media to discuss the future of Olympic coverage on the Internet.
The IOC said it will accredit a limited number of Internet organizations to cover the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City but will not permit "moving images or audio taken from within Olympic venues."
A select few companies were awarded credentials, including Yahoo Sports and some smaller Web sites that cover specific events. Larger players, such as ESPN.com and SportsLine, were not given credentials.
Other Net woes
Beyond anti-Web regulations, Internet coverage of the games has been complicated by the economic meltdown that has wiped out hundreds of dot-coms and forced others to recast their businesses. The troubles have struck companies large and small.
Earlier this month, Logictier backed out of a deal to host the SaltLake2002.com Web site, according to the Salt Lake Organising Committee.
The committee said Logictier's decision to pull out of the deal stemmed from a change in its business focus; the company will continue to work on the site until a new partner is found.
The announcement followed another would-be Olympics Web player that collapsed in the dot-com wipeout. Last month, San Francisco-based Quokka Sports filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and effectively shut down, having run out of cash.
The failure has left NBC without an Internet partner to run its NBCOlympics.com Web site, at least for now. The two companies had collaborated on Olympics coverage in Sydney under a deal that was expected to extend through the Winter Games.
The debate within the IOC is a familiar one. Like any traditional media business, the Olympics is struggling to balance event programming in the Internet age. TV stations pay huge amounts of money to broadcast events exclusively, be they sitcoms or sports. The Internet threatens this system in a number of ways: impinging on regional TV licenses, breaking embargoes on events that TV would like to delay for broadcast at peak viewing times and fragmenting audiences, to name a few.
At stake is a fortune in TV rights.
Since 1995, the IOC has inked with broadcasters from around the globe long-term TV deals that run through 2008 and are worth about US$5.1 billion. The largest single payout came from General Electric's NBC, which paid US$3.5 billion for American rights to the games during that period.
"The fear is that the television broadcast networks have paid huge amounts of money around the world and they don't want to be trumped by the Internet," said Scott Doniger, an analyst at Forrester Research.
