People today watch online gaming videos for two main reasons: To learn the tricks that will help them get better at a game, and to see what a game is like before they buy it.

Those insights have historically come from a few thousand broadcasters — hobbyists who were willing to invest in extra hardware and software to record and comment on their gameplay.

But now, the game-video networks that have previously been middlemen between hobbyist and viewer are trying to embed themselves directly inside games. If they succeed, then the number of people making videos is poised to explode, and a third reason to watch will emerge: To see and talk about the games you and your friends play.

Meet the Middlemen

The big dogs in the ring right now are Twitch and YouTube. Twitch, formerly known as TwitchTV, focuses on live-broadcast gameplay and gaming-related shows, and boasts that it grew from 28 million unique viewers in February to 34 million uniques in March.

The much bigger YouTube (maybe you’ve heard of it) is hardly a gaming-only site. But its gaming content, most of it on-demand rather than live, notably includes countless “let’s play” videos, which run viewers through the whole experience of a game — except, of course, for controlling it.

Both Twitch and YouTube are now rolling out tools that let game developers embed recording and streaming functionality directly into their games. And they’re not alone.

At its PlayStation 4 announcement in February, Sony said its new controllers would have a built-in “share” button to let players edit, upload and share the last few minutes of their gameplay via social media. The company also plans to offer live gamecasting to Ustream, which competes in live video with Twitch’s parent company Justin.tv.

“It’s blurring the lines between traditional media and new media,” Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable said. “Gaming has been a key part of our growth.”

On the mobile side, Finnish startup Everyplay gives players of connected games the ability to post a recording of their latest gaming session via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and email. And wouldn’t you know it, Everyplay is also working on live broadcasting functionality for iOS and Android.

“As mobile games get more complex … we’ll see very fast growth for live broadcasting, starting probably toward the end of 2013,” Everyplay CEO Jussi Laakkonen predicted.

We’ll Do It Live!

Twitch marketing VP Matthew DiPietro argued that, even though Twitch now supports on-demand videos across its site and apps, the company is still centered on live game broadcasts above all else.

“Videogames as content are engaging because you’re seeing them happen in real time,” DiPietro said. “You don’t watch football after the fact … I mean, you do, but it’s usually cut up and produced highlights. The core of [our] engagement is because we have all of the live content.”

That’s an exaggeration, since sites like YouTube and Ustream are also doing it live. But even YouTube spokesperson Matt McLernon acknowledged that, for Google, “it’s still early days for live [video].”

“We want people to see YouTube as a home for all kinds of video,” McLernon added.

The two most common types of live in-game videos today, speedruns and e-sports, cater to the enthusiast rather than the general viewer. Speedruns capture a talented player’s attempt to play a game — often, a linear platformer like Super Mario Bros. — from start to finish, in as little time as possible.

E-sports, meanwhile, are usually more formal tournaments for the best players of hardcore multiplayer games like Starcraft 2 and League of Legends.

CC BY-SA Kevin Chang

To him, live is everything. “It is wrestling that is real,” Graham said.

But he acknowledged that e-sports broadcasters can do more to make games more accessible to outsiders, possibly by focusing on the human stories of the people who play, Olympics-style.

But this is the crux of the challenge for gamecasting: Right now, the most compelling use case for the technology is for a substantial but decidedly not-mainstream audience of hardcore gamers and uber-geeks.

This is why giving developers the tools to make broadcasting and sharing game clips totally simple is so important to the video guys. Removing the hurdles to gamecasting for players means more diversity, more videos and more ad revenue.

Something for Your Trouble

Naturally, Twitch, YouTube and Everyplay will all tout the ease with which developers can integrate and run with their video-making tools. But why should those developers even bother with video in the first place?

The carrot on the end of the stick is the hope that players making videos about games will spread the reach of those games to new audiences. With so many games to choose from, on so many platforms, converting a new player — for free, no less — when he or she is in non-gaming mode elsewhere online, is the holy grail.

“Users don’t have a discovery problem, but developers have a discoverability problem,” Laakkonen said. He said that 12 percent to 20 percent of the people who watch a mobile game video through Everyplay then go on to download that game via an included link.

And letting your fans do the advertising for you is seen as a proven formula, thanks to a little game called Minecraft. The megahit sandbox game thrived in part because screenshots and videos made and shared by happy players proliferated throughout gaming communities when the game was still relatively young.

Minecraft developer and publisher Mojang is fully supportive of that sort of sharing, said business developer Daniel Kaplan. Minecraft “let’s play” videos have been such a crucial part of the game’s rise that, for its April Fools’ Day prank, Mojang let a few dozen popular YouTubers in on the joke early, asking them to make fake playthroughs of awful “improvements” to the game.

Mirroring the popularity of “let’s play” videos, all four of these approaches to gamecasting either already make it possible for players to add commentary to their videos, or plan to do so. So, someone looking to become the next djWHEAT can talk about their strategy, or flesh out that human story about why and how they play.

It seems likely, though, that the end result of this push into video will be one familiar to those who remember the early days of blogging: A few breakout stars who will join the old hobbyists in attracting a mass audience, plus a much larger ensemble of video makers who will reach only a few people in their own circles.

While we’re here, a few prime examples of all these types of videos:

Let’s Play:

Everyplay:

Speedrun:

Watch live video from Siglemic on TwitchTV

E-Sports:

Watch live video from mlgsc2 on www.twitch.tv

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

Heads up, cord-cutters: If you want to watch March Madness next year, you’re going to have to pay up.

The last two rounds of next year’s college basketball tournament, including the championship game, are likely to be broadcast on one of Time Warner’s Turner network channels — TBS or TNT — instead of CBS, according to Sports Business Daily and the New York Times.

CBS and Turner share coverage of the tournament, and the switch for the final games was already scheduled for 2016. No one has explained why the two companies are moving the date up by two years, but it fits a pattern we’ve seen for several years: Big-time sports events migrating from free TV to pay TV.

In 2006, Monday Night Football moved from ABC to Disney’s ESPN. If you wanted to watch much of last summer’s Olympics, you needed a pay TV subscription that gave you access to NBC Universal’s cable channels. And as SBJ’s John Ourand notes, the BCS college championships, the NBA conference finals and some baseball playoff games have all moved over to cable, as well.

The free-to-pay move serves the interests of the TV Industrial Complex in several ways: The cable networks, flush with cash from subscriber fees, can afford to pay big bucks for the rights to what is must-see TV for many people. And because it’s must-see TV for many people, it helps raise the overall value of the cable networks (Rupert Murdoch used the same strategy to turn Fox into a legitimate broadcast operation two decades ago).

And moving big-time sports to pay TV helps pay TV, period. Nielsen figures there are five million cord-cutters, or cord-nevers, and that number would presumably be much bigger if you could get sports online without paying for TV.

Which is why I’ve been waiting for Google, or Apple, or Intel, or some other TV outsider to pony up for the rights to a slate of NFL games, or some other sports franchise that millions of people have to watch, no matter where they are. Hasn’t happened yet.

(Note that if Aereo, which distributes broadcast TV over the Web without paying programmers a penny, wins its court case, then expect just about every big broadcast show — not just sports, but everything — to move from broadcast to cable networks owned by the broadcasters. Big if, though.)

Meantime, if you’re serious about college hoops and you’re serious about not paying for TV, you might still have a legal option next year.

Last year, CBS and Turner offered a $4 package that let you watch the games live on Android and iOS devices, and that option has gone away this year. This time around, you can only stream the Turner games if you’re an “authenticated” pay TV subscriber, though you can still stream the CBS games to your PC without registration.

But Turner/CBS are offering app users a free four-hour “preview” this time around. So if you’re willing to do a little planning — and if the option is still available — you could save up your preview time for the championship game, and at least watch that one for free.

That sounds like a lot of work, right? That’s what the pay TV guys are hoping you think …

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

Meanwhile, a question for the Web video guys: Are you bummed out about Al Jazeera’s Current TV deal? Maybe you should be.

Because this is a deal you could have had for yourself.

The Internet isn’t going to get its hands on TV’s most valuable properties, like big-time sports, anytime soon. But Al Jazeera would have been a perfect candidate to bypass cable and go digital-only.

Consider:

You’ve already got the infrastructure: A few years ago, the Web’s capacity to handle lots of streaming video was an open question. But now we’ve seen — courtesy of the Olympics and Felix Baumgartner’s space jump – that this isn’t a problem, at least not for a cable-sized crowd.

You’ve already got the eyeballs: No need to reiterate the size of YouTube’s audience (but it’s around 800 million people worldwide, in case you’ve forgotten). The more important part is that Al Jazeera’s prospective U.S. audience — news junkies, Muslim Americans, Muslims living in America, etc. — are quite certainly already getting most of their information from the Web. They do that now because they have no choice, but my hunch is that even when Al Jazeera shows up on cable, they’ll keep consuming most of their news on the Web. Because that’s where they like to consume it.

You’ve got the flexibility: Right now, anyone in America can stream Al Jazeera whenever they want, for free, without paying for cable. But that’s not the case with Current TV or nearly any other cable network, because the cable providers who pay for cable programming don’t want it going out on the Web for free. They want to package Web access (along with phones, tablets, connected TV, etc.) as a “TV Everywhere” bonus for pay-TV subscribers. Maybe Al Jazeera wants that, too. But moving from Web-only to cable means it will have much less choice in the matter, regardless.

So why not spend much less than a half-billion dollars and make Al Jazeera the Web’s first “real” TV news operation?

If you’re a Web video guy who wants to make yourself feel better, you can tell yourself that its owners have misjudged TV’s value. Maybe they’re like all those guys who bought newspapers at the end of the ’90s. Or maybe they’re like Japanese trophy hunters buying Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center at the end of the ’80s.

But if you’re waiting around for an ambitious, deep-pocketed player with global appeal to make a big bet on Web video as a real TV alternative, you just missed a huge opportunity. May be a while before you get another one.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Altay Kaya)

Yahoo turned in a meh third quarter, which came as no surprise to anyone. But none of it matters, since all eyes were on what new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer would say on the investor call today.

Here we go! It is Mayer’s first outing as a public company CEO. She’s been an exec at Google her whole career and, while she has been a prominent public figure in Silicon Valley, she has never run the whole show herself.

Until today, that is!

2:01 pm: Finally, we are hearing from Mayer, who arrived from Google in July.

She is “thrilled to be at Yahoo” and the first 100 days at the company have been a lot of fun.

She’s apparently been a fan since her undergraduate days at Stanford University.

Finally, she tries to answer the big question: “Why did I in particular come to Yahoo?”

Why, indeed, given she and others at Google have spent those years since college putting Yahoo directly into the ground. (Did you know Yahoo gave Google its first big search break, a deal engineered by Mayer and others?)

But, says Mayer, Yahoo is “tailor-made for me,” ticking off arenas such as “search, mail, advertising, home page.”

It’s what she built her career on, apparently — yes, in kicking Yahoo’s behind — but now she wants to help the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant “grow and help redefine” itself.

Still, she stresses, trying to buy as much time as possible from investors: “It will take multiple years to get to where I want the company to be.”

2:08 pm: Mayer, of course, touts her Apple iPhone-and-free-food spending to make the life of Yahoos better (and on parity with the rest of the digital sector).

To be fair, given the past two CEOs, anyone who did not come in and kick the employees where it counts was going to get some claps.

Mayer’s goals are “simple,” she says, “to execute fast, attract the best talent and make Yahoo the best place to work.”

She says she has assembled a stellar world class exec team to accomplish that.

2:11 pm: Now we get to meet one of that team and a Yahoo newbie — CFO Ken Goldman (pictured here). It’s his first day.

He repeats the results that Yahoo has already put in its press release, which is why I usually zone out here and focus on superficial stuff.

Like how much he sounds like former and ousted Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson. Eek!

Goldman touts Yahoo’s recent Alibaba Group deal in China (done not by Goldman, but by outgoing — jacked by Mayer, really — CFO Tim Morse) and notes a $765 million credit facility that Yahoo apparently got this month.

That’s more dough to add to Mayer’s ever-growing pile to spend on fixing Yahoo.

2:23 pm: Mayer is back — Goldman is nice enough, but everyone wants to hear from the former Google wunderkind.

She makes an obvious statement: Yahoo has to “grow at the same pace as the market we are in.” Yep. Yahoo’s growth has been practically non-existent, while the industry has seen robust increases for years.

Mayer is now hitting all the high points on what needs to be fixed.

Search, communications, a desperate need to invest in mobile. “Our top priority is a focused, coherent” mobile strategy, she says. It’s everybody and their mother’s top priority in the Internet space, but it’s gotta be said.

So Mayer says it again: “Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company.”

She also name-checks “delighting users,” improving advertising and personalization.

2:27 pm: She also underscores that Yahoo will now hold onto its ad tech business.

“No one wants Yahoo to grow more than the people who work here,” says Mayer, who says she is going back to Yahoo’s roots. “We believe Yahoo’s best days lie ahead … and we intend to win.”

It sounds very good, but Mayer has been relatively unspecific overall.

Now to Q&A to see if she will drill down more.

2:30 pm: The first question is about Mayer’s vision as compared to others.

Apparently, it does not mean a “pivot” into different and new businesses. It does mean improving what Yahoo has done well.

“I don’t think this is a situation where there’s a giant pivot and we go into a completely different business,” Mayer says flatly. In other words, no string of Yahoo diners in the offing.

In addition, Mayer says that Yahoo occupies a unique spot that does not put it into “channel conflict” with other rivals and, presumably, can be a better partners.

Also asked about search versus display, she’ll take both, but found display “more compelling.”

The next question is about international markets and the local ones.

Growth, says Mayer, although Yahoo will be narrowing the offerings to be more compelling.

She refers to the recent closing of Yahoo operations in Korea. “We had a very hard time finding a growth story moving forward,” says Mayer.

As to local, which Mayer worked on at Google right before she left, Yahoo’s efforts are merely “good” and it’s not slated for investment going forward.

The next question is about metrics to judge progress. Yahoo left out user numbers it has usually provided in the past and Mayer is not giving up any data now either.

Instead, she is going to rely on internal data and not use third-party data any longer. (It makes some sense since the numbers have been not so pretty over time.)

2:37 pm: Mayer did not want to go into acquisition strategy, which came in a question about its giant pile of dough.

No billion-dollar buys for her, she claims, so cancel that Tesla order for Foursquare, Dennis Crowley!

Mayer noted that most acquisitions will be smaller scale and under $100 million. She noted she had done about 20 of those in her career at Google.

A question about Microsoft.

While there has been “disappointment,” Mayer says the goal is to work with the software giant. In other words, she’s not calling her old pals at Google quite yet (she hasn’t yet, in fact).

The next question is about mobile, with Mayer noting once again that the company has to be primarily mobile-focused going forward.

She’s going to hire as many mobile peeps as possible, especially via smaller-scale acquisitions.

2:44 pm: Goldman gets a little awkward in noting that his young-adult kids think Yahoo is all happening. Hmm, I suppose since he comes from the deservedly defunct Excite@Home and the successful but security-dull Fortinet, that makes sense.

In fact, getting back the young folks is one of Mayer’s top challenges.

A very good question — these are all good ones on the call — is how Yahoo can compete without a mobile operating system, such as Google Android and Amazon Kindle and Apple iOS.

Mayer notes that Yahoo has compelling content that others do not.

Another question on search and, specifically, on mobile search.

Mayer is unspecific, except to note that Yahoo has the ability to be pertinent and competitive.

She is a little more clear on the issues with the Microsoft Bing search relationship. Mayer does know this stuff well, and it is clear there is some serious low-hanging fruit to be plucked by someone who knows what they are doing.

Mayer knows search, to be sure, so I am thinking she will make some bank here.

A question about “overmonetizing” the Yahoo site — i.e. cluttering it up with icky ad units that drive consumers nuts.

Mayer notes that cutbacks in ads to improve user experience will only be done to increase traffic, which is a dicey proposition as it can also kill revenue.

A question about content and where that us going.

Mayer touts the Olympics programming — hat tip to former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — as something unique to Yahoo. Interestingly, the media folks at Yahoo are still wary of pro-engineering Mayer.

2:55 pm: Another question about her interest in content and investment focus in ad tech.

“I am very product focused,” says Mayer, who uses the term “low latency,” a term that no media person ever would use as a hallmark of success.

She is much more comfy talking tech and that’s an area she knows better. Still, she says little about possible investments.

Mayer is then asked about goals for growth at Yahoo. She does not just want to grow at industry rate, but beyond that! But she’ll take industry rate for now (actually, that would be a huge accomplishment).

Goldman says little on the stock buyback, using the Alibaba dough, except they are buying.

3:01 pm: There are a lot of questions today for Mayer — which is no surprise — but now they are beginning to repeat.

(Plus, I have LOLcat’s Ben Huh waiting for me in the ATD Global HQ lobby — and you all know how I feel about them cats!)

Ah, the last question: It’s about data and personalization and what’s been lacking at Yahoo in not taking advantage about the pile of data it has about .

Yes, that should happen and it will under the regime of Marissa Mayer.

Mayer ends by noting, “It’s time for Yahoo to execute and bring our results back to growth.”

So it is written, so it shall be done.

In a timely move, Wavii is bringing its crawling power to Election 2012 with Wavii Politics, a new section of the site that essentially acts as a landing page for the many disparate political articles circulating around the Web.

Just as before, it’s all about looks. Wavii drills down across different categories appropriate to the election — topics like ads, debates, speeches from candidates and fundraising events — and splays them across the page in snippets anchored by photos. Click on a quote cribbed from the article, and the site serves a page filled with articles on the subject, with the most relevant pieces given top billing.

Wavii has taken this topic-based approach to news since its launch. But the company came up with the idea of this curated landing-page approach after one engineer’s idea proved popular. Amid the myriad complaints of NBC tape delays and broadcast confusion during the Summer Olympics, a Wavii employee began an internal project tying together a page keeping tabs on all the big winners of the games by country, medal, event, and so on.

The neatness of the presentation made sense of a muddled situation; one where confused viewers just wanted accurate, instant information amid the mess of press coming out of the events. Naturally, CEO Adrian Aoun tells me, that scenario logically extends to the political arena.

And after the brutal boxing match that was Tuesday evening’s presidential debate, I’m guessing we’ll have a lot of writing to sift through. At the very least, Wavii’s new page will make it prettier to look at.

And if you’re interested in the future of Web video, YouTube’s ability to serve up eight million livestreams at the same time is a really big deal, too.

As I noted yesterday, that number blows away YouTube’s previous peak of 500,000 concurrent streams, which it hit this summer during the Olympics, as well as last year during the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

So it doesn’t take much imagination to envision YouTube doing this kind of stuff, at this scale, on a regular basis. Which would mean the Web finally has a chance to rival TV when it comes to serving up live events with huge audiences — one of TV’s last remaining advantages over the Internet.

That won’t happen anytime soon, though. Death-defying jumps from outer space aside, there are only a few live events that millions of people want to watch at the same time. Basically, a handful of award shows like the Oscars, and big-time sports.

Even if YouTube wanted to pay up to get its hands on that programming, it’s going to have to wait, because the TV guys have the rights locked up for a long time. The next set of NFL deals, for instance, won’t be available for a decade.

But YouTube is still going to be an important platform for live stuff. It’s just that you probably won’t see most of it, unless you’re in a very particular niche.

Here’s some of the stuff YouTube has streamed live in the last year or so:

• A concert from Psy, the “Gangnam style” guy
• A concert from AKB48, a Japanese girl group
• A bunch of EDM shows (that’s “DJs playing music for big crowds,” for the rest of us)
• A concert by Jay-Z at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn
• A World of Warcraft launch event, which featured gamers playing Mists of Pandaria around the world
• A bunch of solar and lunar eclipses

None of these shows drew more than a couple-hundred-thousand concurrent viewers, which would make them the equivalent of a poorly rated cable TV show.

And that makes sense: Since the Internet has trained us to watch anything we want, whenever we want to, why do we have to watch when everyone else does? (A semi-secret about the live video streaming that news sites like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal* and the Huffington Post do, for instance: Almost all the viewing comes after the fact, via on-demand clips.)

On the other hand, as YouTube proved conclusively yesterday, it can now mount this stuff without breaking a sweat. Now it’s basically a plug-and-play option for any grown-up company that wants to do business with Google. And YouTube is going to make it increasingly available to the rest of us, too.

That’s the result of a year of around-the-clock work by a couple-dozen YouTube engineers, to prep the video site for the Olympics in July.

YouTube software engineering director Jason Gaedtke,who oversaw that effort, says the livestreams the company put out during the Olympics were seven times better than the standard video-on-demand stuff YouTube puts out everyday. His team is now applying the lessons it learned from that effort, and using it to upgrade YouTube’s video more broadly.

So, yes. If someone else wants to grab the world’s attention by breaking the sound barrier aided only by gravity, you’ll be able to watch it alongside a global audience of millions.

But the future of live video on YouTube is probably going to look like something else: You and several thousand other people, watching something most of the world doesn’t care about.

And that can be thrilling in its own way.

*The Journal is owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site.

Meantime, I believe that Baumgartner, his sponsor Red Bull and YouTube have already set a record: By YouTube’s count, there are more than two million livestreams of the event going out around the world. (Update: The audience for this one kept climbing as Baumgartner did. Latest total: 8 million.) The previous record for a single Web video service: Around 500,000 concurrent streams, which Google served up during the Olympics this summer.

(Thanks to Eugene Wei for reminding me that Barack’s Obama inauguration in 2009 set a different Web video streaming record: Web video utility Akamai reported that it served a peak of seven million streams to different Web video outlets, though not all of them were live video.)

There are a couple reasons this thing is so big on the Web: For starters, you can’t see it live anywhere else. (Correction: My mistake — in the U.S., the Discovery Channel is carrying the same stream live. Not sure about other countries.) Another reason: It’s a crazily exciting stunt, which means it should appeal to just about everyone, all around the world.

Update: Now that the original stream has ended, here’s a 90-second highlight reel of the mission.

There’s also a backstory here about YouTube’s ability to serve up this kind of live event with ease, but we’ll get to that later. For now, enjoy, and hold your breath.

Except for this one problem: Lots of people who wanted to see the show, which was available only over the Web, couldn’t watch.

The Rumble 2012 Web site seemed unable to process orders for many customers — the show charged $5 a head — and some of those who did get through reported other technical problems.

What happened? The only word from the “Rumble 2012″ production team was a tweet blaming “overwhelming demand.” But that shouldn’t fly in 2012.

Due 2 overwhelming demand, our servers have been overloaded. We apologize for any inconvenience and we’re working to resolve the issue.

— The Rumble 2012 (@therumble2012) October 7, 2012

The Rumble 2012 Web site, meanwhile, doesn’t indicate that anything is amiss. Instead it promises that you should be able to see a replay of the show “shortly.” It’s been saying that for more than 90 minutes. [Update: As of now -- 11:19 pm ET -- the site's streaming option still doesn't work, but I seem to be able to download the show as an MP4.]

At this point it’s worth noting that the production company credited for this event is something called Nox Solutions, which says it’s responsible for running Web sites for the likes of O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham. Perhaps if these guys try this again, they might want to work with YouTube, which was able to provide some 500,000 concurrent streams during the Olympics.

But to be fair, a quick Google search shows that lots of folks watched the show without much problem. I was one of them: I headed over to the site about 30 minutes in advance, handed over my credit card info and started streaming without a hitch at 8 pm Eastern. The site didn’t require me to provide any kind of password or log in, and the video quality was quite reasonable. And I have ordinary, frustrating/adequate Time Warner Cable broadband.

I will say this for the Rumble 2012 people: They seem to have done a good job at working with YouTube to prevent people from uploading clips from the show. Someone named “MISSUNIVERSEMEXICO” has put up a set of unwatchable screengrabs, but beyond that, this is the best I can offer. I assume it will go away shortly:

UPDATE: Here’s the whole thing, via a frustrated Roger Ebert:

Google* continues to oblige, this time via one of the best “Saturday Night Live” sketches, ever. Downside: You only get the first two minutes of this classic. Upside: Martin Short, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest, at their best.

*Astonishing that Google Video continues to exist, separate from YouTube, in the Larry Page “focus” era, no?

You’re welcome.

The race is scheduled to go off around 3:14 pm ET, so if you want to watch, fire up your browsers now. Don’t know if this will also work on NBC’s Apple and Android apps. Can’t guarantee this will work at all, actually, but worth a shot. (Stream seems to work, but we’ll see.)

Update: NBC sports PR confirms that the pay wall will be down for this one, and says it does so for “some” events daily. Given that this is one of the biggest competitions of the day, that still seems like a meaningful decision.

Background: Earlier today, NBC officials held a press call to argue that their Olympics coverage has been a big success. Part of that strategy involves streaming all events live on the Web, but only to customers with pay-TV subscriptions.

Happy?

Hope so. Because Lazarus, backed up by NBC research guru Alan Wurtzel, spent the rest of the call describing the network’s coverage strategy — everything live on the Web, much of it live on some cable channels, and the glamour sports on prime-time tape delay — as a huge success.

Some of the stats you’ve heard before: Ratings are well above the 2008 Beijing Olympics; NBC now thinks it may break even or perhaps make a small profit on the Games, instead of losing $200 million, etc. And many of the numbers were new.

A sampling of data points, which the company said come from NBC internal research, third-party surveys and some studies being done by Google and comScore:

• On Sunday, 43 percent of Americans said they had heard about some of the Games’ results over the Web before they saw them on TV. But NBC argues that this turns out to be just fine: 67 percent of people who knew about the results said they would watch, anyway — more than people who hadn’t heard about the Games.
• On Saturday night, people who had watched livestreamed events that day were twice as likely to watch parts of the same events on the prime-time tape delay.
• NBC has streamed 64 million streams over the first six days of the Games, and 29 million of those were live.
• The most-streamed event so far was the women’s gymnastics team finals on Tuesday, which generated 1.5 million streams.
• Roughly 60 percent of the streams are going to desktops and laptops, and the rest are going to mobile (NBC is providing apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as Google’s Android platform).

I’ve asked NBC for a little more detail on some of the streaming stats, so if I get them, I’ll plug them in here later. [UPDATE: See below]

But again, the main point is that NBC thinks the Games are going swimmingly so far. The complaints you’ve been writing and reading about (oftentimes, you’re doing both, right?) are from a small part of the audience (or non-audience). Lazarus says: “The silent majority has been with us.”

Readers with access to Google will note that Lazarus was using language first used popularized (Wikipedia!) by Richard Nixon to defend the Vietnam War. And some of them will make hay with that. NBC figures that the rest of them will be too busy watching the Games to care.

Here’s the full list of talking points/data points Lazarus and Wurtzel shared with reporters today, courtesy of NBC PR.

LONDON OLYMPICS RESEARCH RECAP
MARK LAZARUS/ALAN WURTZEL CONFERENCE CALL
AUGUST 2, 2012

TAPE DELAY
According to a U Samp survey of 1000 viewers 18-54:
43% said they heard the results of Olympic Events.
Of those who had heard the results:
67% who knew the results said they were more likely to watch vs. 54% who did not hear the results.

According to a proprietary project with Google to measure the same individual’s media use across platforms:
Viewers who streamed live events on Saturday were nearly twice as likely to actually watch the Primetime Broadcast, and they spent about 50% more time watching than those who didn’t stream.

DIGTIAL:
According to Omniture:
Nearly 28mm people have visited NBCOlympics.com – 8% growth over Beijing.
Nearly 4.6mm people have been to the mobile site – double the number from this time in Beijing.
Two new platforms are drawing fans:
The iPad and iPhone apps have been consistently among the top five apps in the Apple Store and have been downloaded over 6 million times.
We’ve delivered 64mm total video streams across all platforms – web, mobile, tablet – a 182% increase over Beijing.
29mm of those streams are to live events, a 343% increase over Beijing.
Since the start of live streaming on 7/25 we’ve delivered 5.3mm hours of live video, already surpassing the total games delivery for Beijing
Number one stream to date is 1.5mm streams to the Women’s Gymnastics Team Final on 7/31

BILLION DOLLAR LAB FINDINGS:

New Media Behaviors
The Olympics are actually changing consumer behavior.
The London 2012 Games are the first time the majority of website and app users have live-streamed content on a tablet, smartphone or online. According to a proprietary survey conducted by Insight Express:
Among tablet users, 76% are live streaming on a tablet for the first time
86% live streamed on a smartphone for the first time
Even an established platform like the web is seeing 36% of website users live stream online for the very first time
68% of visitors during the London Games did not visit the site during the 2010 Vancouver Games

Next Olympic Generation
These digital initiatives have enabled us to achieve tremendous growth in viewing by kids and teens. According to Nielsen data:
Total teens up 28% compared to Beijing.
Viewing by teen girls 12-17 up 52%, teen boys up 7%
Kids 2-11 up 33%

Social Media
Social Media is enhancing consumers’ interest, enjoyment and engagement with the games.
From a U Samp research panel of social media users 13-49:
82% say “with all the buzz I have become more interested in watching the Olympics.”
Two-thirds (64%) say “I’ve gotten more interested in these Olympics because friends and family members are actively involved in posting and tweeting about the Games.”

Power of the Olympics:
As an advertising platform:

The Olympics is an incredibly powerful and effective advertising platform.
Working with Nielsen IAG, we analyzed the performance of 82 commercials which ran in both the Olympics and in regular prime time programming. IAG surveyed consumers who saw the spot during Olympic programming, as well as consumers who saw the same commercial in non-Olympic programming. Based on over 3000 completed surveys, commercials seen in the Olympics delivered on average:
67% higher brand recall
96% higher message recall
31% higher “likability”

As a cultural phenomenon:
According to a U Samp panel:
59% say “I’m hooked on these Olympics”
44% are sleeping less because they’re watching more
40% stayed home all weekend
37% delayed doing their laundry or other household chores
36% are following the games at work

Final interesting fact:
“Archery is the new curling.” The numbers are huge.
Archery delivered an average 1.5mm viewers, the highest rated cable sport, beating out basketball.

We should not and cannot be in the business of proactively monitoring and flagging content, no matter who the user is.

– Alex Macgillivray, General Counsel at Twitter, in a blog post explaining Twitter’s behavior in the suspension of journalist Guy Adams’s account

In a blog post, Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray confirmed that Twitter personnel working in partnership with NBC flagged a Twitter post Friday from Mr. Adams that contained a corporate email account for Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Oh. My Twitter account appears to have been un-suspended. Did I miss much while I was away?

— Internet Olympics cause celebre Guy Adams, who will presumably have much more to say, right away

Electronic Arts and Zynga are duking it out for top honors among the best game companies in the world. However, at the moment neither of them is close to winning the gold.

At last count, Zynga wildly missed analyst expectations for its second quarter, leading to a drop of more than 40 percent in its stock, sending it to an all-time low. The next day, EA’s shares came tumbling after, posting a new low for the year.

Tomorrow, EA has a chance to regain investor confidence as it reports results for its fiscal first quarter. And while it may be easy to assume that if one company has a hard quarter the other will too, that’s not what all the analysts are saying.

Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities said he isn’t revising his expectations based on Zynga’s poor performance. “Zynga’s losses are other people’s gains,” he said.

Pachter reasoned that since Facebook’s revenues from payments, which are used to make purchases inside social games, were up slightly in the second quarter vs. the previous period, it’s likely Zynga’s quarter had more to do with Zynga itself than any broad trend. Specifically, Zynga said it suffered after Facebook made changes to its network, which consequently led to a drop in bookings for the company’s older games.

Wall Street analysts will be looking for EA to report a loss of 42 cents a share on revenues of $501 million, excluding some expenses. Based on the company’s internal guidance using the same non-GAAP metrics, it is expecting to lose between 40 cents and 45 cents a share on revenues of $500 million.

A successful social games quarter, however, does not mean the company is entirely out of the woods. Social gaming makes up one of EA’s smallest contributors to revenue — or so we’d guess since it doesn’t yet have to break it out. About half of its revenues still are coming from the ailing packaged goods sector, which includes blockbuster hits such as Battlefield 3, Madden and Mass Effect 3.

According to NPD, which publishes monthly data on the industry, EA’s first-quarter software sales were down 50 percent year over year.

But those losses are likely going to be offset by gains in digital revenue as EA is forecasting another 40 percent increase in digital revenue in the 2013 fiscal year. Besides social gaming, other forms of digital content includes downloadable content for its console and PC games, like Star Wars: The Old Republic. There’s mobile gaming, too. Last quarter, the company said Bejeweled Blitz, which it obtained through the acquisition of PopCap a year ago, was its top grossing app on Apple’s App Store.

By the end of last week, EA’s stock regained some ground after hitting that low. Today, however, it slipped 18 cents a share, or 1.6 percent, to close at $11.23.

If it’s any consolation, EA still has something to brag about: Its market cap is now higher than Zynga’s, which hasn’t always been the case since Zynga went public eight months ago. At the end of trading today, EA was worth $3.6 billion and Zynga was worth a mere $2.2 billion (or about equal to the cash it has on hand).

This is part of Best Buy’s “College Innovator” campaign, and apparently started airing this weekend, timed to the Olympics. But I’m pretty sure I saw it while fast-fowarding through “Breaking Bad” on DVR last night.

Obviously, this is a push into the mainstream for Foursquare, so that’s nice for those guys.

Based on a survey of one, though, I’m not sure it’s an effective campaign for Best Buy, or Sprint, which gets a tag at the end. I spent the morning searching YouTube in vain for “Dennis Crowley Foursquare AT&T” — perhaps because the “smartphone” Crowley fidgets with throughout the ad, but never identifies, appears to be an AT&T model.

But I still had some recall. So that’s something, right?

I’ve asked Crowley and Foursquare’s PR rep for comment, but haven’t heard back. To be fair, Crowley seems to be spending a lot of time right now trying to get NBC’s livestream onto his flat screen (apparently Boxee works).

Update: Here’s Foursquare’s Erin Gleason:

We’d been talking to Best Buy for a few months about having Dennis participate in an ad campaign similar to the one they ran during the Super Bowl, featuring Kevin Systrom and others. We worked closely with them to develop a concept that both sides were excited about. We thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce the all-new foursquare to a large audience. And as a side benefit, we were able to donate the fee from the shoot to CampInteractive, a non-profit that Dennis, myself, and several other foursquare employees are involved with.

The network said on Sunday that ratings for the opening night of competition were its best ever. With 28.7 million average viewers for its evening coverage, NBC said it had nearly five million more people watching than for the Beijing games and two million more than for the 1996 Atlanta games, the prior best.

Among the markets it tracks, NBC said Salt Lake City, San Diego, Calif., and Kansas City saw the highest ratings.

Some of those viewers were clearly the disgruntled ones that learned of the results via Twitter — or even from “NBC Nightly News,” which gave all the key results ahead of the primetime coverage — but watched the coverage, nonetheless.

NBC’s decision to delay the opening ceremony also came under fire, but nonetheless drew in tons of primetime viewers.

Plus, unlike in past games, NBC is offering the ability to watch every event live online and on mobile devices, for those that don’t want to wait.

As for that streaming, NBC told AllThingsD that it delivered 7 million live streams and 13.2 million total streams on Saturday. It delivered 943,000 streams of Saturday’s swimming session alone.

In Beijing for the first day, NBC served up 1.6 million live streams and 5.2 million streams in total.

The peacock network said that ratings for its daytime and late-night coverage also soared, though the initial coverage has come on a weekend, meaning more people were off work to watch it.

Updated, 3:45 p.m. PT with Web streaming stats.

Wow, pretty embarrassing.

But it turns out that isn’t the most embarrassing display of Internet ignorance by a pair of “Today Show” hosts.

Check out this clip of then-”Today Show” hosts Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric, reportedly from an unaired segment in 1994.

In the segment, the hosts debate how to pronounce the @ sign.

Gumbel thought it was pronounced “at,” but Couric thought it was “about” or “around.”

But it was Gumbel that wasn’t really clear on the whole Internet thing.

“What is Internet anyway,” Gumbel asks after reading. Couric explained that it was a massive computer network that was becoming really big.

“What do you write to it, like mail?” Gumbel said.

It’s a shame, because it took attention away from a pretty cool tribute to the history of tech and the way it has transformed modern life and communications. Text messages, status updates, photo sharing and smartphones all played a part.

Indeed, every seat had an LED panel to create a stadium-wide megadisplay.

“One more thing I don’t understand,” Viera added.

Evidently someone handed them a memo, because Viera was able to correctly identify Berners-Lee several minutes later, as he typed out a message (on a NeXT cube) that was shown on that oh-so-confusing LED screen.

“This is for everyone,” Berners-Lee wrote.

The Twittersphere was, naturally, quick to pounce on the NBC gaffe. One commenter remarked that perhaps deposed “Today Show” host Ann Curry could have helped them out, and others noted that it was NBC that said it couldn’t livestream the ceremonies because it needed to add its expertise.

Here are some highlights:

There’s only one problem: NBC is just now starting its coverage of the same ceremony for those of us on the West Coast. Plenty of tweets and re-tweets went out from NBC even before the ceremonies were shown on the East Coast.

Now, NBC has paid millions and millions for the rights to televise the games as they see fit. But tweeting about the same ceremony that they made us wait for seems a bit cruel. (I wasn’t alone in that sentiment, as clear from this Wall Street Journal blog, in which I was quoted.)

Thankfully, NBC is offering live coverage of the athletics themselves, a welcome change from the Vancouver games, where key sports were also shown on tape delay. And, in a first, the games will also be available on mobile devices, for those who have a pay-TV subscription that includes CNBC and MSNBC.

For its part, an NBC representative had this to say about its decision to delay its broadcast of the opening festivities:

“They are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context, which our award-winning production team will provide for the large primetime audiences that gather together to watch them,” the network told The Wall Street Journal.

That’s great and all, but how many people really have that many friends who even post location-tagged updates? And how often do you want to receive random pings from strangers who saw that you just posted a photo at a nearby place?

But here’s one way Banjo could shine: It’s launching a new “trending places” feature, where users can quickly navigate to any place in the world where a flurry of updates are being posted. You can imagine this being useful for planned and unplanned major events, from festivals to natural disasters.

The first showcase for trending places starts this week at the London Olympics, and there’s a new version of Banjo released today that includes the feature.

So, from anywhere in the world, you can open up Banjo on iPhone or Android and check out photos and posts associated with each Olympic venue and sport.

On Friday, when you turn on the television to watch the opening ceremonies, you could also load up the Banjo app to see all the athlete and fan photos from within the Olympic Stadium.

The charm is that you don’t have to know who to follow in advance, and that anything geo-tagged to that place and time is highly likely to be relevant.

You could kind of think of Banjo as a “place browser,” where you can zoom all over the world and see what people are posting in that moment. That includes posts from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and LinkedIn (though I can’t imagine many athletes will be live-updating their resumes).

With this update, Banjo is “really becoming less about the here and more about the there,” said Damien Patton, CEO of Redwood City, Calif.-based Banjo.

Banjo is a year-old product with two million registered users. For now, trending topics and places are global, but soon they’ll be personalized, Patton said.

Banjo users who leave the app running currently get notified about five times per month when it determines that there’s relevant content or people nearby, according to Patton. Also this week, Banjo is bringing on one of its first brand partners, Westfield Shopping Malls, which will alert users who are actually at the Olympics about Wi-Fi and charging stations via push notifications.