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NBC owns the U.S. rights to the Vancouver Olympics, and, for this Olympics, it has clamped down on online live streaming of events. Only hockey and curling will be shown live online, with all other events either shown live on television or held for tape-delay airing on prime time or late night television, says the industry publication Broadcasting & Cable in a story Monday. The Web site for CTV, the Canadian network with rights to the Olympics in that country, is live-streaming events, but NBC has made sure that computers with U.S. IP addresses can't log onto the CTV site.

Media Decoder of the New York Times explores why the 2010 Winter Olympics may be the first loss on Olympics broadcast in NBC's history.

"Social media blogs complain about too much advertising on NBC's Vancouver Olympics. And yet NBC has released new viewer data showing that in virtually every single category - including brand recall, engagement, and other marketing metrics - numbers are up for advertisers who bought into the winter games. Viewership is up right now, too: some 25% higher than the 2006 games in Torino, Italy."

NBC, with its exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics, cut away from the closing ceremonies to debut its new marriage show starring Jerry Seinfeld. Outraged viewers took to twitter, and the incident raised an interesting question of balancing exclusive rights against commercial interests.

An withering critic of NBC's decision to limit online streaming of Olympic events to curling and hockey, in what the author describes as an attempt to force viewers into traditionally measurable media.

NBC's current online coverage of the Olympics is discussed in light of the online technology and the use of "cable verification" to establish new online models limiting free content.

"The Internet, which many feared would draw viewers away from television, appears to be having exactly the opposite effect - at least when it comes to coverage of major events. Brian Stelter writes in The Times that TV executives have noticed big spikes in viewership of the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Grammys and other special events that some of them trace to the effect of social networking sites."

Sponsors are looking to generate buzz for ads through social media, hoping to repeat the success of Super Bowl advertisers who expanded their audience by using social networking sites to spread ads.

Video of Luge Crash raises interesting discussions about copyright and Fair Use. Google would not comment on the particular video but offered this general statement. "We approach each video individually, and we do not prescreen content. Instead, we count on our community members to know the Guidelines and to flag videos they think violate them. We review all flagged videos quickly, and if we find that a video does break the rules, we remove it, usually in under an hour." And, interestingly enough, regular TV broadcasters, with no licensing agreement with the IOC, are employing the fair use argument and airing the clip. Yet YouTube, and other online outlets are so terrified of the constant bullying from content creators that they're not going to take any chance and are taking the video down. In the end, nobody wins, people don't have access to the information, online video sites lose viewers and trust from their users and the IOC comes out as trying to hush up an unpleasant situation and (mis)using copyright law to do so.