Can mobile clear the Olympics hurdle?

The 2008 Summer Olympics officially commence today in Beijing, and for some time, industry onlookers have anticipated the event as a potential tipping point for mobile entertainment, citing global interest in the games, the growing proliferation of smartphones and an unprecedented media investment in mobile coverage spearheaded by NBC, the Olympics' exclusive U.S. broadcast partner. One problem: It doesn't seem like that many Americans are particularly interested in the Olympics. In the days leading up to this year's opening ceremony, sports coverage on TV and radio in the U.S. has focused almost exclusively on NFL training camps and the Brett Favre comeback soap opera, with some unusually exciting major league pennant races also attracting their share of attention. And when the Olympics do enter the conversation, the talk seems to dwell more on pro-Tibet protesters, pollution fears, doping speculation and traffic tie-ups than on the athletic competition itself.

But a forecast issued this week by media research firm Nielsen Mobile suggests that mobile subscriber interest in the Olympics is strong after all. Nielsen estimates that 44.7 percent of mobile video users and 22.6 percent of mobile web users in the U.S. are likely to turn to their phones for Olympics highlights and updates, compared to 31.3 percent of mobile video subscribers and 17.2 percent of mobile web surfers in the U.K. A majority of U.S. mobile subscribers (66.3 percent) cite Olympics event results as their most desired mobile web information, followed by medal counts (44.3 percent) and TV schedules (43.7 percent); conversely, in the U.K. 73.5 percent of respondents want event results, 37.4 percent want to read articles and 34.2 percent desire medal counts. Among U.S. mobile video viewers, 61.7 percent want to screen gymnastics highlights, 58.5 percent want swimming/diving highlights and 54.4 percent want track and field clips--in the U.K., meanwhile, a whopping 89.9 percent want track and field highlights, 59.1 percent want boxing and 53.7 percent want gymnastics.

So will the Olympics prove a boom or a bust for mobile? That ultimately depends on the games themselves, not the media platform--if the competition is exciting and the human drama compelling, Americans will tune in across multiple screens. Looking back over the last year of mobile sports coverage, two events stick out as unquestionable landmarks: The first took place in late November 2007, when the Green Bay Packers squared off against the Dallas Cowboys in a meeting of 10-1 teams--the game became a cause célèbre because it aired exclusively on the NFL Network (a cable channel available in only about 35 million U.S. homes) and on Sprint handsets. "The user numbers were tremendous," recalled MobiTV chairman and CEO Charlie Nooney when I spoke to him last week. The second took place in June, when golf's 2008 U.S. Open spilled over into a Monday playoff pairing eventual winner Tiger Woods against underdog Rocco Mediate. ESPN reported huge fan interest in the tournament across multiple platforms, with its WAP site averaging more than 2 million unique daily visitors throughout the five-day event, generating nearly 3 million mobile page views in all.

The point is that you can't predict which athletes and events will emerge as must-sees on mobile, or even why--sometimes it boils down to broadcast rights issues, other times it's because a tournament that should have been decided over the weekend instead climaxes on a Monday afternoon. In the case of the Summer Olympics, mobile has time on its side: With Beijing 12 hours ahead of the east coast, few U.S. viewers will be in front of their big-screen TVs when the marquee events air live. And undoubtedly some events will fare better on mobile than others--basketball, soccer and other team sports that unfold over longer periods of time just aren't a good match for the platform. But if subscribers don't tune in, it's not a failure of the mobile content model--it's a byproduct of a sports fan culture where the Olympic Games no longer capture the collective imagination the way they used to. Still, you never know what will happen ... which is the beauty of sports, and why we watch in the first place. -Jason