Thursday - October 5, 2000

Olympics Online: Old Media Beat New Media

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is releasing a report today that looks at how American Internet users experienced the Olympics online. In a nutshell, the Internet was a very minor player in people's experience of the Games. TV was far and away the preferred source of news and information about the Olympics.

Some key findings:
58% of American adults got some sort of information about the Olympics on a typical day when the Games were taking place. Less than 4% of them got information online about the Olympics.

In a head-to-head matchup, the Americans who got Olympics information online still think TV covered the Games better by a 2-to-1 margin -- 59% of this subgroup thought TV covered the Olympics better vs. 24% who thought the Internet covered the Games better.

Just 17% of Americans with Internet access got any kind of information about the Games online while they were taking place.

We also found that there was no overall surge of traffic on the Internet related people getting sports news during the Games and that most users were not anxious to get lots of extra information about athletes or competitions online. They got news of the results (usually by chancing upon it) and that was pretty much it.

Our conclusion: There was a lot of talk that the Internet would emerge during the games as a rival to TV, but it wasn't even close. The heavy restrictions on the kind of content that Web sites could post no doubt played a role in this. But it is also clear that the Internet has a considerable distance to go before it becomes as powerful and entertaining a medium as TV for an event of the magnitude of the Olympics. At best, the Internet provided a supplemental information source for a modest fraction of online Americans.

A Web Safety Check
According to the New York Law Journal:

"Imagine that you operate a Web site and host message boards and chat rooms. Now imagine that you are served with a lawsuit claiming that you have infringed the copyright of a major record company by distributing on your site the latest hot tune on the charts. You say, of course, "No way! We aren't in the music business!" Maybe you use other, more colorful words to that effect.

Then you find out that someone has been using your message boards to post unauthorized music for others to download. You find out that copyright is what lawyers call a strict liability tort, meaning that you are guilty of infringement whether or not you even knew the material was on your site, and whether or not you authorized it..."

Click here for the full story. [Link no longer active]

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