NBC feeling agony of winning Winter Olympics

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: In the days leading up to the Vancouver Winter Games, which run through the end of the month, Olympic skiers hoping to get their training runs in were running into trouble with reduced visibility because of heavy fog on the mountains. : NBC knows the feeling. When it comes to the 2010 games, it has had trouble seeing the steep drop-off ahead since June 2003. : That's when it won the U.S. rights to the Winter Olympics that would be awarded to Vancouver as well as the 2012 Summer Olympics that would go to London for a preemptively high $2.38 billion, $810 million of which was earmarked for rights to this month's extravaganza, plus a $200 million global sponsorship deal from parent General Electric. : People obviously will tune in, yet GE still expects NBC will lose $200 million on Vancouver, maybe more. The company line is it didn't anticipate the economy and ad market would be what it is today. That's probably true. NBC didn't. Others, however, did. : News Corp.'s Fox bid only $1.3 billion for 2010 and '12, at the time citing conservative projections about the economy in the years to come and doubts about the ability to generate meaningful new-media revenue. And Walt Disney Co., which wanted the 2010 Olympics for ESPN and ABC and offered the International Olympic Committee a revenue-sharing deal, hit the nail on the head. : "We did as good a job of projecting into the future, as well as you can," Alex Wallau, president of ABC, told The New York Times upon announcement in Switzerland that NBC had won the rights. "I don't have a feeling that we miscalculated or misjudged anything." : And they didn't, even before the economy, and the media business in particular, would get whacked like Nancy Kerrigan's knee. : At the same time, that economy has been given some of the credit for the recent surge in viewership for big TV events, such as awards shows and last weekend's Super Bowl, which also no doubt benefited from snowbound viewers out East. : What may prove a challenge for NBC is that Vancouver isn't really any more exotic to viewers than Seattle, and the kind of American-centric storylines the network likes to play off over the course of the games haven't been established as firmly as in years past. : Downhill skier Lindsey Vonn was on Sports Illustrated's cover as a top U.S. medal contender, but is tending an injury. Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert has sponsored some U.S. speedskaters and will be part of the NBC broadcasts. Others to watch include speedskater Apolo Ono, snowboarder Shaun White, freestyle skier Shannon Bahrke and figure skater Evan Lysacek. : Typically, there is at least one U.S. women's figure skater upon whom the network can hang its coverage. But Rachael Flatt, whose name brings to mind the country music band Rascal Flatts, is No. 1 in the nation but only No. 9 in the world. : Things can and have been worse, however. Maybe not from a pure dollars and cents standpoint, but still … : Anybody remember NBC's Olympics TripleCast? : It makes the network's Jay Leno-in-prime-time/Conan O'Brien-"Tonight Show" debacle look like a minor miscalculation. : Back in 1992, NBC bet big that at least 2 million people would pay for three channels carrying supplementary coverage of the Barcelona Games on top of what it was providing elsewhere for free. The price tag was $125 for all 15 days, or $29.95 per day if bought individually. And I remember asking almost everyone I ran into in the days before the Olympics if they intended to spring for it. : Most gave me a puzzled look that said, "Triple-wha?" : Many said absolutely not. : A handful said, well, maybe. : My favorite response actually came from someone who was working with NBC at the time. : "I think they're all sold out," this guy said of the TripleCast. "I don't think you can get it anymore. They've sold so many of them I don't think they have the technology, the capacity at this point, to even offer it to any other homes. It's a total sellout." : The guy was Jerry Seinfeld. He was being sarcastic. : NBC fell short of 2 million TripleCast subscribers, even as it dropped the price. The actual number wound up around 125,000. : Reports at the time had NBC splitting a TripleCast loss of more than $100 million with partner Cablevision. : That was a foggy mountain breakdown, without the foggy mountain, just the downhill plunge and the agony of defeat.

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