Twenty years ago, during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, NBC aired 170 hours of coverage, entirely on its flagship network.
Four years later, in Sydney, its Summer Games coverage more than doubled to approximately 440 hours, primarily because it added coverage on its various cable partners for the first time.
Care to guess how many hours NBC plans to air for the Rio Olympics, which kick off formally with Friday’s Opening Ceremony?
Even with full understanding and context of the seismic shifts in the media landscape since Atlanta and Sydney, the answer is truly staggering.
For its ninth consecutive Olympics and 15th overall, NBC will provide 6,755 hours of coverage over 11 networks, its NBC Sports app, and the NBCOlympics.com website.
More than 2,000 of those hours will be televised, with the other approximately 4,500 streaming online through the Aug. 21 Closing Ceremony. (A cable subscription is required to use the live stream, though an initial half-hour trial with five additional minutes per day is available to cord-cutters.)
That’s 1,200 more total hours of coverage than it offered just four years ago in London, when its streaming services were introduced to mixed reviews.
NBC Olympics executive producer Jim Bell said the advances in technology aren’t the only reason for the expansion of coverage from one Olympics to the next. Rio offers enticing conditions for live coverage since its time zone is an hour ahead of the East Coast.
It also means that NBC already has a sense for what its prime-time coverage will look like every night, barring surprises.
“We have a pretty good handle on what [the prime-time lineup on NBC] is going to be,’’ said Bell. “Those are really the sports that are the most popular, that get a lot of attention, have the most established stars: Swimming, gymnastics, track and field, diving, and beach volleyball.’’
Bell said swimming and track and field would be presented live in prime time, but gymnastics is more likely to be packaged, in part to allow room for the storytelling that is such a staple of NBC’s coverage.
“Occasionally another sport might present itself in a way, but really the good news for mega fans of the Olympics is that’s where you’re going to get those popular sports with polish and production level of the highest quality,’’ said Bell.
“Where if people are looking for a specific sport that might not be in prime time, they can stream it — every sport, every frame of Olympic competition is now available to every fan online.’’
While NBC has by Bell’s estimate more than 2,000 staffers in Rio, not everyone who will be broadcasting the Games is on site. Some events will be called by broadcasters watching on a monitor in NBC Sports’s colossal Stamford, Conn., headquarters.
Off-site broadcasters are not new for NBC — for instance, Celtics voice Mike Gorman called handball matches for the London Games from the network’s old studios in Manhattan in 2012 — but it might come as a surprise to viewers that those describing the action are not actually in attendance.
“The technology is such that it’s a lot easier and it comes at no expense to the viewer to have these people in Stamford,’’ said Bell. “So for us it’s just a much smarter proposition overall if it doesn’t impact our quality in any way and we can manage things more efficiently.’’
Given what NBC has at stake, Bell unsurprisingly expressed confidence that the various and well-documented issues surrounding Rio would not mar the Olympics or require more than cursory coverage on network broadcasts.
“I think when people are tuning in to watch the Olympics, they’ll want to watch the Olympics,’’ he said. “There are always concerns, justifiable or otherwise, or some justifiable, some maybe a little bit extreme.
“But we had it certainly in Atlanta, Sydney, Athens by all means, in London and Sochi, where there are different things that we had to be aware of. It’s not our first rodeo. We have a pretty good sense of how to gauge certain things and the risks that are involved.’’
Irish connection
As if its lucrative partnership with Turner Sports weren’t evidence enough that Bleacher Report has come a long way as a sports-media player, consider this news: Notre Dame announced Thursday that it had reached an exclusive social content partnership with Bleacher Report that permits full behind-the-scenes access to the Irish football program including practice, locker room, and game-day activities. They will collaborate on content across various social media platforms. The partnership appears to be a coup for both sides. Bleacher Report gains further prominence by associating with the storied program, while Notre Dame gains an enormous media venue to hype its program to the masses without any concern that actual journalism will interfere . . . Tom Jackson, who has spent 29 years as an NFL analyst at ESPN, is retiring. His final assignment is the Hall of Fame Game and its attendant festivities in Canton, Ohio, this weekend. Jackson is widely respected by his colleagues but has been persona non grata in Foxborough after saying after the 2003 opener that the players “hate their coach.’’ Bill Belichick had cut popular safety Lawyer Milloy, who joined the Bills in time for a 31-0 rout of New England to start the season. The Patriots went on to win the Super Bowl.
Chad Finn can be reached at finn@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeChadFinn.
