RTE and other host broadcasters will of course be the primary point through which we will watch and follow the Olympic Games but there is an increasing prevalence towards ‘watching’ live action through the medium of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
An analysis on ‘Mashable’ this week shows the growth of social media which had barely begun at the last Olympic Games in Beijing.
Facebook had just breached 100 million users but is now at nine times that figure. Twitter has been even more explosive with 300,000 daily messages in 2008 rising to 400 million every day now.
Twitter will feature on the main Olympic scoreboards at venues and will be a key feature of all ‘mainstream’ broadcast channels as well.  It will be the primary marketing channel for athletes, who will need to take care not to fall foul of Olympic marketing restrictions aimed at protecting main corporate sponsors.
RTE’s broadcasting of 2,300 hours over live coverage is impressive but how much more will be viewed on You Tube where users upload 72 hours of video content every minute.
These are exciting times and sport is leading the way as the one area of conversation that is truly global.  Few could have forecast that this would be so prevalent from one Olympic Games to the next.  Whoever can forecast what the next developments are between now and Rio in 2016 will make a lot of money.
All we can say is that Sport for Business will seek to provide enough insight and intelligence over the next four years to keep you in the loop.
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