YouTube Launches Olympics Channel

Written by Steve Donohue

Friday, August 8. 2008 at 05:45 PM EDT Post a comment

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

no ratings

• Login to Rate

NBC may have exclusive U.S. rights to distribute Summer Olympics programming from Beijing on both TV and the Internet, but that’s not stopping YouTube from launching a dedicated Olympics channel.

YouTube rolled out The Summer Games YouTube Channel Friday.The video on the channel contain new stories, human interest pieces, behind-the-scenes footage and features. Content suppliers on the channel include The Associated Press, Getty Images, The New York Times, Reuters, Sexy Beijing, and Travel Channel.

But the channel won’t include videos from the actual Olympics competitions -- NBC has exclusive U.S. rights to offer live and on-demand video from Beijing online. The company is offering more than 2,000 hours of live Olympics events on NBCOlympics.com, and more than 3,000 hours of on-demand videos.

YouTube announced a deal with the International Olympic Committee earlier in the week to offer daily highlight videos from Beijing. But those videos are only available to Web surfers in Nigeria, India, South Korea, and more than 70 other countries that aren’t covered by official Olympic sponsors.