During yes­ter­day afternoon’s Econ­sul­tancy Round­table at the Globe The­ater, I was seated next to Alex Bal­four, head of new media for London2012.com, the com­mit­tee that is orga­niz­ing the 2012 Sum­mer Games in Lon­don. (See info about the Lon­don 2012 Open Week­end on July 24–26.)

Mid­way through our ses­sion, the dis­cus­sion turned to media cov­er­age of the Olympics. I asked Alex about the ten­sions between the con­trac­tual rights demanded by tra­di­tional media and the bur­geon­ing cov­er­age by grass­roots media pub­lish­ers — con­flicts that seem to crop up at every Olympics.

Dur­ing the 2008 Bei­jing Games, blog­gers were upset over NBC’s attempts to quelch any online video cov­er­age of same-day events. If mem­ory serves, NBC served YouTube with scores of take­down notices to remove ama­teur video cov­er­age of com­pet­i­tive events, and there was even a decree at one point that cell phones would be banned from the stadium.

In 2012, what hap­pens when big media bump up against shar­ing culture?

[Added: Alex was speak­ing infor­mally and didn’t expect a blog post to come out of this part of the con­ver­sa­tion — I was remiss in not obtain­ing his per­mis­sion prior to pub­li­ca­tion — so none of this can be attrib­uted to London2012 as offi­cial policy.]

Alex obvi­ously doesn’t speak for NBC but sug­gested their No. 1 con­cern is around live mov­ing images. The net­work is not so much both­ered about peo­ple cap­tur­ing images. “We wouldn’t and can’t stop any­one from gen­er­at­ing or cre­at­ing con­tent at the event,” he said. It’s likely that NBC will again work with YouTube to remove con­tent that it believes con­flicts with its con­trac­tual rights.

Is live stream­ing an option?

I asked what harm would result with live stream­ing — some­thing Robert Scoble is doing on the trip with Kyte and Howard Rhein­gold is doing with Qik. Alex said sup­port­ing 80,000 peo­ple who want to stream media would present insu­per­a­ble tech­ni­cal bar­ri­ers. (That was a politic answer. I’ll guess that Olympic author­i­ties will take proac­tive steps to pre­vent any live video stream­ing dur­ing the Games.)

Alex made the good point that for the vast major­ity of peo­ple, “you want the best footage from the best equip­ment,” and NBC will be gen­er­at­ing 5,000 hours of footage dur­ing the Games — that’s six months of tele­vi­sion view­ing if you were to watch it all.

Balfour’s team is now work­ing to incor­po­rate pub­li­cally gen­er­ated and approved con­tent at 80 venues in 30 city cen­ters. “We’ll pull con­tent into phys­i­cal spaces, into screens of all sizes, embed­ding it into archi­tec­ture,” he said.

The chang­ing mediasphere

Alex also told the story of how some of the young adults he encoun­ters are told of the days not long ago when you had to go to the TV and radio sta­tions and news­pa­pers to try to have your voice heard. “They look at you in dis­be­lief. The Inter­net gives every­one the abil­ity to self-organize — every­one has per­mis­sion to speak. They may not be heard, but it may happen.”

He also said of his orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee: “Our role is to act as a cat­a­lyst, not merely to stage an event.”

Inter­est­ing fac­toid: Alex pointed out that the tele­vi­sion rights for the 2016 Olympics will be sold this fall before the tele­vi­sion net­works know which city — Chicago, Toyko or Rio de Janeiro (or pos­si­bly Madrid) — will host the Games.

Related:
• See other images of Alex Bal­four I’ve taken

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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