Aereo Makes Cutting the Cord Even Easier, And Cheaper

Cord-cutting startup Aereo announced new pricing plans for its service on Thursday, including a “try for free” plan.

Aereo allows users to watch live broadcast-- television from an iPhone, iPad, Mac running Apple Safari or Roku device.

Users can also record programs on a cloud-based DVR for access in the future. For now, the service is only open to users in New York.

Aereo is a disruptive company. Before the service even--- launched, it was already being sued by local and national broadcasters. The networks allege that Aereo is violating re-transmission laws and guidelines and violating their copyright. For its part, Aereo says that everything it is doing is covered by legal precedent.

Last month, Aereo got an early win in its battle with broadcasters when a federal judge refused to grant an injunction against the service. That means that Aereo can--- continue to operate and expand into new markets while litigation is taking place.

This sort of litigation could take years to resolve--- but with the first major hurdle out of the way, the company is ready to move forward.

Better Pricing

When Aereo soft-launched back in February, the company had basic pricing plan of $12 a month for unlimited content and 40 hours of space on a DVR (users have access to two tuners, which means that they can record two shows at once or --watch one show live while recording another).

When I spoke with Kanojia at Aereo’s first launch event, he didn’t seem married to the pricing structure recognizing that extended user feedback would--- be needed to reach the right price point.

He reiterated that outlook to me last week, explaining that--- after looking at the space and speaking with customers, it seemed “silly to have--- one-size fits all pricing,” especially for a service like Aereo, which aims to disrupt traditional viewing models.

Aereo now has five price plans. On the low end, users can try Aereo for one continuous hour a day for free no credit card required.This is a great way for users to get a taste of the experience, user interface and picture quality.

For users that might want to watch more than an hour of television, but don’t want to pay for an entire month of service, Aereo also offers a new Day Pass. For $1, users get access to Aereo for 24 hours. Moreover, they can record up to 3 hours of programming and will have 10 days to watch their recordings for free.

The monthly plans now start at $8 for 20 hours of DVR storage. For $12, users still get 40 hours of storage, just like before. Both monthly plans also offer a free second month for users.

For users willing to pay in advance, they can get Aereo for $80 a year. Annual plan users will also get three months of service for free. That ends up working out to about $5.30 a month which is less than Netflix, Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime.

To us, the most compelling offerings are the annual plan and the day pass. As we’ve seen with the Olympics, there are lots of users who want to tune into live sporting events, but don’t necessarily want (or need) to own a traditional television set or antenna. The great thing about a day pass is that a user can buy it for the big game and then be done no recurring charge.

The Future: More Devices and More Cities

Beyond the new pricing plans, Aereo also has its eyes firmly on the future. Kanojia told me that in the next few weeks, users can expect support for Aereo on Android and in other web browsers.

Aereo works using HTML5 and its video quality is incredibly good every bit as good, if not better, than the HD cable stream I get from my cable provider or an online stream from TV Everywhere providers such as CNN and HBO Go.

To ensure that level of quality, Aereo needs to build its streaming output engine for different device types. iOS and Roku have robust standards streaming--- live video, which is why those devices were available at launch. The Aereo team has had time to work out the requirements for other platforms, so Android and Chrome users can soon expect to see Aereo on their devices.

Aereo also has big plans for expansion. Immediately after the court ruled in Aereo’s favor ---denying a preliminary injunction against the service----Aereo investor and uber media mogul Barry Diller announced that the company would be coming to more cities.

Kanojia told me that the company is actively looking to expand into every major television market--- think Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, etc. starting in 2013.

Olympics Begone! Browser Extension Blocks Some Spoilers

One of the downsides of the first social Olympic Games: it’s difficult for Olympic fans to shield themselves from Games-related spoilers online.

Greg Leuch, a developer The Free Art and Technology Lab has tried to remedy this problem with the creation of Olwimpics, an Olympics spoiler blocker.

The browser can’t block coverage entirely; indeed, in our tests, quite a few spoilers slipped through. But it does recognize keywords associated with the Games and places a different Olympic color over each one whenever they appear.

Keywords barred include Olympics, ceremony, medal(s), bronze, silver, gold, sports, meters (and other mentions of distance), as well as all sporting event names such as archery, boxing, volleyball and so on.

Olwimpics is available for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. It’s already been downloaded more than 2,000 times.

“I created this and other blockers as digital art pieces for public consumption, and prefer to not look at them as actual software,” said Leuch. He has created other similar pieces as personal speed projects Olwimpics took a mere two hours to build.

“There are a few minor bugs and quirks with some pages that load dynamically like Twitter, or really really long pages,” Leuch adds. We’ve noticed inconsistencies in word blockage on social networks that aren’t as apparent on news sites. (We’ve included some examples in the gallery below.)

While it’s nowhere near being a full spoiler blocker, the extension does at least give you a heads up when someone mentions the Olympics and allows you the opportunity to skip that post. It is also a little reminiscent of Mad Libs.

If you try it for kicks, be aware that it will block stories that make mention of other sporting events such as professional and college sporting events and even little league.

Is NBC Too Big to Handle the Olympics?

Every sports fan in the U.S., it seems, has a story of how badly NBC has screwed up their London Olympics-viewing experience. So far the widespread fury has spawned a popular hashtag, #NBCfail, numerous Twitter parodies, outrage over a tribute to terrorism victims that was cut from the opening ceremony, and the brief banning of a British journalist from Twitter.

It’s not just about the network’s insistence on waiting to show events on TV that took place up to 16 hours earlier; any fan with a TiVo and a work schedule must at some point get used to the game of waiting and avoiding spoilers. Besides, a cable subscription and an Internet connection will yield you as many hours of online coverage as you can handle.

No, it’s the fact that NBC seems insistent on spoiling its own coverage across as many forms of media as possible because its left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

The Today Show promo incident is the best-known example. Fans sat down to watch Missy Franklin compete in the 100m backstroke, only to see a teaser for her appearance on NBC the following morning complete with Franklin flashing her gold medal before the time-delayed race had even started. (The network has since apologized.) Worse, though, is that NBC’s balkanized approach to the Olympics is spoiling its live online coverage.

If you were watching Michael Phelps in the 200m butterfly Tuesday via the network’s Live Extra iPad app, according to the Los Angeles Times, and you also had the NBC Olympics app, your enjoyment would be ruined by a notification from the second app popping up to tell you Phelps had won while he still had a good 50 meters to go in Live Extra.

The Times jumped on this as proof that NBC’s live streams are slightly delayed too. I have no problem with that; there are any number of reasons why a video feed from across the world might run a little slow. My question is: Why on Earth would NBC have two separate Olympics apps that don’t talk to each other?
No wonder thousands of us are fleeing for the commercial-free comfort of BBC Olympic coverage, any place we can find it.

Big Media Malaise

I don’t want to pile on the Peacock in particular; I have no idea whether CBS or ABC or Fox could do a better job. The problem with all the networks is simply this: They’re large media organizations with many disparate parts, most of which tend to exist in competition with each other.

I saw this in person during my 13 years at Time Inc., particularly after it was taken over by AOL. Every day, thousands of well-groomed media executives would talk about the search for synergy, the industry’s favorite buzzword. In reality, those executives were really focused on protecting and expanding their department’s budget.

To be territorial, in that vast corporate landscape, is only natural. Why work with a strange team from the other side of the company, when their success might affect your team’s bottom line? Why give your best stuff away? Keep the glory for yourself, and the CEO will certainly know your name.

And let’s not even get into the problems of pleasing advertisers, affiliates, business partners and shareholders. Suffice to say that the larger and more public the organization, the more masters it serves.

Put a Startup on It

Now imagine what would happen if we handed Olympic coverage to a tech-savvy startup. They’d focus on the solution. There’d be no room for in-fighting or disintegration. A core team of engineers would work tirelessly to ensure seamless coverage on every platform you can imagine. Ads would appear at the bottom of the screen, YouTube-style, rather than constantly interrupting the action. Notifications and tweets would be timed to perfection.

The TV networks all of them could grab as much of the feed as they wished. The Olympics would become open-source. An event that claims to celebrate sportsmanship and team play would finally be seen, in the U.S., in a way that lives up to those ideals.

Don’t hold your breath, though. NBC paid $4.38 billion last year for exclusive rights to broadcast the summer and winter Olympics through 2020. The best we can hope for is that the network learns from its 2012 mistakes, and hands all forms of Olympic coverage over to a small and well-coordinated team, a startup within.

‘Blade Runner’ Makes Olympics History With Carbon-Fiber Legs

Oscar Pistorius, a member of South Africa’s national track and field team, will make Olympics history as the first athlete to compete with a prosthetic limb. The sprinter will compete in the 400-meter race Saturday, using two high-performance carbon fiber artificial legs.

Many people have questioned whether Pistorius, known as “Blade Runner” because of his sleek prosthetics, has an unfair advantage over athletes competing with biological limbs.

“It’s not that I don’t want to run Paralympic or disabled races, or races for those athletes who are handicapped, or amputees,” he told NPR. “But this is just a challenge for me, and any good sportsman that wants to be better has to face up to challenges that aren’t always as easy as some of the others.”

Pistorius was barred from play during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing by the International Track Federation. He challenged the decision at the Court of Arbitration of Sport, which ruled that he had no advantage and could compete if he had qualifying race times.

The court’s decision was based on research from the University of Colorado, which measured Pistorius’s oxygen consumption in comparison to other athletes. The Blade Runner uses the same metabolic energy as his elite athlete peers.

Pistorius notes that he’s one of tens of thousands of people using prosthetic legs, yet he’s the only one in the world who can run 400 meters in under 50 seconds.

The South African sprinter’s prosthetics were created by Össur, called Cheetah, which are custom-built from high performance carbon fiber specifically for athletes. The company says they are optimal for both transtibial (through the shin) and transfemoral (through the thigh) amputees.

Runners April Holmes and Marlon Shirley, two Paralympic athletes, also wear Cheetahs.

How to Watch the Olympics Live via the BBC in the U.S.

In the U.S., NBC offers live coverage of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games online and through its Olympics Live Extra app. Still, many have criticized this coverage, as the hashtag on Twitter, #nbcfails proves.

However, there is another way to stream the Olympics, despite NBC’s “exclusive” contract to do so.
Lifehacker published a step-by-step guide for U.S. customers to stream real-time content from London via the BBC.

 SEE ALSO:

For Mac customers, you must first create a free account with your email address at Unblock Us. Once your account is verified (which takes mere seconds), you’re good to go.
From there, follow these directions:

• Open System Preferences –> Network
• Select either Wi-Fi (for wireless) or Ethernet (for wired)
• Select Advanced –> DNS
• Click the plus symbol and add these two DNS servers:
208.122.23.22
208.122.23.23
• Reboot your computer

Stamped App Now Lets You Create Spotify and Rdio Playlists

Stamped, the recently revamped recommendations app backed by the likes of Justin Bieber and The New York Times Company, pushed out a small but useful feature Monday night.

Now, in addition to listening to songs recommended by friends in Stamped [iTunes link], you can add those songs to playlists in music players Spotify and Rdio without leaving the app.

Robby Stein, one of Stamped’s three co-founders, says the startup has “proprietary technology that finds the same song across Rdio, Spotify and iTunes that makes this possible. I don’t know of any [other] service that does this right now.”
Neither do we.

It’s one in a series of features that helps you not only discover recommendations, but act on them. See a good restaurant recommendation? Check out the menu, view photos from Instagram and book it on OpenTable. A movie? Watch a trailer in iTunes, purchase tickets through Fandango or add it to your Netflix queue. You can also purchase books via Amazon, and buy apps and MP3s in iTunes.

Not all of the integrations are as seamless as Netflix’s, Spotify’s and Rdio’s. If you want to buy a movie ticket, you’ll be sent to fandango.com in Safari. Likewise, you’ll be sent to Safari to purchase a book, and to the App Store to play a movie trailer. In an earlier interview, Stein said he hopes to deepen Stamped’s other third-party integrations in the future.

Michael Phelps Breaks Record for Most Olympic Medals

Michael Phelps swam his way into Olympic history books Tuesday, nabbing his 19th Olympic medal.

The 27-year old swimmer took home the silver medal in to 200 butterfly and then anchored the United States to gold in the 4×200 freestyle relay.

Phelps broke a record set by Larisa Latynina, a Soviet gymnast who won her last of 18 Olympic medals back in 1964.

Phelps took home eight gold medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At the 2004 Games in Athens, the swimmer took home six gold medals and two bronze.

NBC was criticized for spoiling Phelps’s loss to teammate Ryan Lochte on Sunday before the games aired on American TV.

Phelp’s popularity and the record-breaking nature of his 19th medal meant that news of the win spread across social media and official Olympic websites almost instantly.

As expected, the Internet is now caught up in Phelps-fever.

Michael Phelps still has two more races to compete in before his Olympic career comes to an end.

Skrillex Drops the Bass While You Browse the Web

Most of us have experienced the annoying interruption from web browsing to change a song (first world problems). Sure, it only takes five seconds but when you’re focused, that could be five minutes spent getting back on track.

Luckily, Skrillex is here to help. Canadian TV station Aux.tv launched the Skrillex Machine, a new site that plays a constant stream of dubstep, placing the electronic artist into whatever web page you’re visiting. Basically, it turns your web browsing into wub browsing (sorry).

Be sure to keep your headphones in, unless your co-workers are cool with dropping the bass.

‘Final Fantasy’ Coming to OUYA Console

The OUYA, the hackable, Android-based game console announced Tuesday they are partnering with Square Enix to bring their games to the console when it comes to market next year.

Final Fantasy III will be a launch title on the console, according to the OUYA’s Kickstarter page. The game will be updated to support the console’s HD graphics and Tegra 3 processor.

This is the third committed title to be announced for the OUYA, which launched its Kickstarter on July 10 with very little information about what games would come to the console. Since its launch, OUYA has raised more than $5.8 million in funding from those interested in supporting and preordering units.

Other titles that have been announced include Hawken, an upcoming multiplayer mech combat game, and prequel chapters to Human Element, a zombie survival game from the designer behind Call of Duty.

Last week, OUYA announced a partnership with OnLive, which will bring the cloud gaming company’s selection of AAA titles to the console.

New ‘Skyfall’ Trailer Reveals Key Plot Points for Bond Film

It’s a good week for James Bond fans: First Daniel Craig parachuted into the Olympic opening ceremony, and now a new trailer for the upcoming 007 film Skyfall has hit the web.

Fans of the Bond franchise have received a few teasers, but this is the first official trailer that reveals details about the plot about which director Sam Mendes has been tight-lipped. James Bond appears to be killed by a sniper, and M (Judi Dench) is shown writing his obituary, which ends up being unneccessary because Bond comes back to life and that’s only in the trailer!

Hulu Plus Comes to Apple TV

Good news for Apple TV owners: Hulu Plus was quietly added to the device’s list of options on Tuesday.

The service went live Tuesday morning, a Hulu rep confirmed. Apple TV currently offers streaming for Netflix, YouTube, Vimeo and Apple’s own array of movies, TV shows and podcasts. Hulu Plus costs $7.99 a month the same price as Netflix’s streaming-only service.

Though not as high-profile as the iPhone or the iPad, Apple TV has been a hit for Apple, selling 4 million units over the past fiscal year. Last quarter, Apple sold 1.3 million of the devices compared to Microsoft’s 1.1 million Xbox 360s.

Swiss Olympian Expelled From Games for Racist Tweet

A Swiss Olympian has been expelled from the Games for a racist tweet he posted this weekend.

Soccer player Michel Morganella posted the offensive message after Switzerland lost to South Korea 2-1 on Sunday. His tweet, according to one widely cited report, in part calls South Koreans “mentally handicapped retards.”

Morganella’s Twitter account, @morgatoss, has since been deactivated, but Swiss news site Le Matin captured a screenshot of the message.

Morganella posted the message Sunday, and Swiss officials decided to give him the boot Monday, the Associated Press reports.

Morganella’s not the the first athlete to be kicked out of the Games by a national Olympic committee since this summer’s “first social Games” began.

Greek Olympian Voula Papachristou was booted from her country’s Olympic team last week after posting a racial joke to Twitter. She later said the punishment left her “very bitter and upset.”

Papachristou’s tweet roughly translated to: “With so many Africans in Greece…at least the West Nile mosquitoes will eat homemade food!!!”

She apologized for the tweet, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the Greek Olympic Committee from expelling her from the Games. A spokesperson also told the Associated Press last week that the episode had prompted the country’s committee to prohibit Greek Olympians from using social media to talk about anything not directly related to the Games for the remainder of the event.

It’s interesting to note that, while some athletes criticized the International Olympic Committee before the Games for restrictions on what they’re allowed to share via social media, the two biggest Twitter controversies so far have been unrelated to those guidelines.

Terrifying Zombies Run Amok in NYC to Protest AMC Drop from Dish Network [VIDEO]

To protest the Dish Network’s recent move to drop AMC and its popular The Walking Dead series, the network unleashed crew of Hollywood-caliber zombies onto the streets of New York, disguising themselves as police officers, hot dog vendors and pedestrians.

The public reaction? Lots and lots of screaming.

The move is a part of a bigger effort from AMC to spread awareness that the Dish Network is no longer carrying the network. The network was removed by Dish due to a lawsuit over carriage fews, along with IFC, Sundance Channel and WEtv cable networks.

“We know Dish has been urging AMC fans to pay additional monies to see their favorite shows online,” AMC said in a statement via the campaign’s site PutZombiesBack.com. “It seems unusual to us for a television provider to ask their subscribers to pay extra money to see the same shows that they are already paying for, and that their neighbors are getting, as part of their basic TV subscriptions.”

It notes that other cable, phone and satellite companies show AMC in its basic package, and encourages fans to consider a new service provider. Some providers have even offered special incentives for people to switch and not miss The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Hell on Wheels and other popular shows.

The video above shows actors undergoing extensive make-up and costume before making the rounds around Manhattan: “Could zombies live among us?” the video asks. “We transformed a few New Yorkers to find out.”

The video concludes with a message from the network: “Zombies don’t belong here,” the video says, as a zombie drags a Dish Network satellite along the street. “Put them back on TV.”

MTV’s ‘Teen Wolf’ Facebook Game Is Feast for Fans in First 5 Weeks

The Hunt, an eight-week scripted social game on Facebook that accompanied season two of supernatural drama Teen Wolf, is boding well for MTV and its “Storytelling Without Borders” strategy.

Users have spent an average of 46 minutes playing The Hunt (or 9 minutes per week), and 81% of them are weekly visitors.

The show hovers around 1.7 to 1.8 million viewers every Monday night, with its key demographic being females ages 12 to 34. Season three will be 24 episodes instead of the current 12.

“At the end of the day, we’re storytellers on as many platforms as possible,” says MTV and VH1 Digital General Manager Kristin Frank, who adds that the show’s writers were involved in scripting the The Hunt.

Players must solve a murder mystery in a storyline and secondary arc that plays out parallel to what’s happening in Teen Wolf episodes. It launched June 4 as of part of MTV’s “Storytelling Without Borders” initiative, which aims to create social TV experiences across digital platforms in between and during seasons.

Storytelling platform SocialSamba created The Hunt and is responsible for other show’s social TV games such as USA Network’s HashTag Killer for detective dramedy Psych and Suits Recruits for legal drama Suits.

The fan engagement for The Hunt makes it prime real estate for advertisers. When MTV released the game, it had not planned to incorporate advertisers. But now MTV thinks weaving in ads non-obtrusively would be a smart move for the game’s next iteration.

Why the London 2012 Olympics Is the First Real-Time Games

Whether London 2012 is the first “social” Games has sparked much debate in news media and on the social web. While compelling arguments have been made for both sides, social media’s role in the Olympics isn’t the most exciting conversation about this year’s competition.
It’s about timing.

The London 2012 Olympics are undoubtedly the first real-time Games. It differs from any other Olympic event in how fans and viewers can experience all competitions while they’re taking place.

Though Friday’s Opening Ceremonies weren’t broadcast live in the United States, all 32 sporting events will be live streamed for the first time ever.

This year’s event is a culmination of media consumption trends that have bubbled up in recent years, including increased mobile viewership and social TV experiences. Here’s a look at how each real-time trend will play out in the 2012 Olympics.

 Expanded TV Coverage

NBC is hosting 3,500 hours of live coverage using nine TV channels, including six networks, two speciality channels and a 3D channel. This is a huge increase from the 2,200 live hours provided from Beijing in 2008. It’s an even bigger leap from the mere 400 hours shown from Vancouver in 2010, where everything but curling and hockey events were held for prime time viewing.

“There are a certain number of fans who want the immediacy of watching it live,” Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Sports Group, told PaidContent. “Since most of it will have to be authenticated or verified, it brings value to our cable and satellite partners.”

The Beijing Olympics were NBC’s first big effort to experiment with live streaming. At the time, there were concerns about the quality of technology and the potential to “cannibalize the audience,” said Chris McCloskey, a spokesman for NBC Sports. Now the network is more confident in the technology, he added. It’s also boosted its online watching repertoire, most notably with the record-breaking 2012 Super Bowl live stream.

“There’s more of a culture for [watching online] now too,” McCloskey said. “People have become more accustomed to consuming this way.”

Mobile Is Ubiquitous

An expected 211 million Americans will tune into the Games this year, and viewing on mobile devices will undoubtedly be widespread.

Close to 107 million people today own smartphones as compared to about 19 million in 2008. Tablets were scarce during the Beijing nor Vancouver Olympics, and now they’re owned by nearly 55 million people worldwide.

While the NBC Live Extra app is integral to increasing real-time mobile traffic around the Olympics, a number of apps created by Olympics committees will provide updates and information. Other media organizations, including Sports Illustrated, Reuters and BBC have also released Olympics apps for viewers to access timely updates.

Social networking apps are hopping on the Games bandwagon as well. Location-based app Banjo released a new feature to aggregate tweets, updates and photos publicly shared on social networks by Olympic athletes and attendees. Sports social network PlayUp launched a new version of its app that allows Olympics fans worldwide to follow scores and connect with fellow users in real time.

Michael De Monte, CEO of live blogging platform ScribbleLive, attributes the success of Olympics live coverage to mobile users. “It’s a live event that a huge population of the world is interested in,” he said. “You have such a huge community of people who are participating, watching, and they’re empowered with smartphones.”

A Truly Social Olympics

Social networks have become the new hubs of real-time self-expression and media consumption, both of which are core to the Games.

Not only has NBC partnered with Twitter and Facebook to engage viewers around Olympics content, but sports fans are updating statuses and sharing media across the globe. Preliminary events earlier this week already inspired a variety of social updates from fans watching in London and at home.

De Monte said he’s seen a huge increase in the demand for real-time tools in the past four years, when the Beijing Olympics were under way and his company was just getting started. More than 57 websites worldwide will use the ScribbleLive platform to aggregate social updates and spark conversations among fans as events are happening.

The increase in real-time viewing of and dialogue about  London 2012 events aligns this year’s Games more than ever with the Olympics mission: global togetherness in sport.

Please, NBC and IOC, Learn How to Share the Olympics

Oh, those Olympic moments. The three-hour opening ceremony was full of them, everything from James Bond escorting the Queen to the stadium (via helicopter and parachute!) to a 10-story-tall Voldemort and giant baby (don’t ask) and, perhaps best of all, the beloved Mr. Bean, a.k.a. Rowan Atkinson, losing himself in a “Chariots of Fire” montage. Spectacular, memorable, viral and mostly, wholly unavailable.

NBC and the International Olympic Committee have tried to make this one of the most connected, social and widely available Olympics ever. It’s on the web, on my iPad, on your smartphone and running 24/7 on TV. Or so it seems. However from the moment the opening ceremonies kicked off in London Friday afternoon to the not-so-instant replay in the United States some three hours later, something’s been off.

Why, for example, didn’t NBC simply run the ceremonies live in the afternoon (at around 2:30 p.m. ET) and then run it again in the evening instead of trying to pretend that the opening ceremony hadn’t happened yet?

NBC and the IOC’s attempt to control the flow of content and information failed almost immediately as participants and audience members started tweeting and Instagramming and, worse yet, at least one website started streaming pristine video live from the event.

Annoying? Yes, but many of us were willing to swallow it and did, in fact, hunker down later that night to watch the opening ceremony rerun.

As one memorable moment after another flickered before our eyes, we began to search for and share memorable moments. The Bond video, we found. It was cute watching the Queen play along as an equally dour-faced Daniel Craig gave his best stoic Bond performance as he led the aging monarch to a live appearance at the stadium in London.

NBC made sure to squeeze dozens of advertisements into the rerun. Again, we were fine with this. At least the spectacle was good and performances like Atkinson’s silly synth player, were viral gold.

Because it had been hours since the live performance, multiple versions of the Atkinson segment appeared on YouTube. None of them, though were official.

Other videos appeared, but soon succumbed to the same fate. It was a digital game of whack-a-mole.

In all this time, no official video from NBC. What were they thinking? Network execs had to know this was a gem and yet they couldn’t offer it.

Here’s why it really galls me, though. A major portion of the opening ceremony festivities was devoted to a tribute to…wait for it…the Internet and social networking. It was all about how the Internet connects us and lets us communicate, how social media influences our lives. To illustrate, the IOC used the charming story of a young couple meeting and then using a variety of digital and social media to stay connected. Facebook doesn’t make an appearance, but there is something on screen that looks a bit like it. There was also a lot of dancing, music and even a house party with a real house. If the message wasn’t clear enough, the IOC hammered home the message by lifting up the giant house to reveal a lone figure sitting at a computer Tim Berners-Lee. The father of the Internet.

Did I say it was live? This tweet went out around the world while a good portion of the world could not see the event. By the time I saw it, Berners was just a digital ghost and his tweet was three hours old. Hours later, that portion of the ceremony was still unavailable on YouTube or any other digital medium.

Ensuring that these videos clips are available to share as soon as possible is in the IOC and NBC’s best interest. If people find the links, they’ll share them on their social networks, building even more buzz for the games and the myriad little human dramas played out within it. If NBC sits on its hands, or the IOC forces it to sit on its hands until hours or days after the viral moments, they pretty much ensure those moments won’t become viral and will have little or no impact on building Olympic-sized engagement.

These Athletes Dominated the Pre-Olympics Social Buzz

With Friday’s opening ceremony, the 2012 Olympics finally got underway in an official capacity after months and months of hype and anticipation. Much of that anticipatory buzz, of course, came on social media. So which sports and athletes most excited the masses and what was popular where in the lead-up to London?

The most popular Olympian on Facebook is American basketball star Kobe Bryant with more than 13.5 million Likes. If soccer star David Beckham had been selected to represent Great Britain, however, his nearly 20 million Likes would make him 2012′s Mr. Popularity.

It’s also interesting to see which sports are most popular with which fans. According to Facebook’s data, swimming is the most mentioned sport among U.S. users, sailing among Brazilian users, horseback riding among German users and kayaking among Korean users. Soccer takes the cake in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Russian and Singapore.

Sailing fans are on average the oldest, at 35 years old. But triathlon and racquetball fans are up there too, with an average age of 34. The sport with the youngest fans? Handball, with an average age of 19. Volleyball and badminton are next; their fans are 21 years old on average.

Radian6′s data, meanwhile, takes into account Facebook as well as Twitter, blogs, online news, YouTube, Flickr, message boards and other sites 150 million sources, all in all. Worldwide, Radian6 says, the most buzzed about Olympic athlete over the past 30 days has been LeBron James of the USA basketball team with more than 78,000 mentions. American Swimmer Michael Phelps and Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, respectively, rank second and third. Here’s Radian6′s top 12:

More Tweets Sent Each Day This Year Than Entire 2008 Olympics

The Olympics officially take over the world for the next two weeks with Friday’s opening ceremony in London, and Twitter just launched its dedicated event page aimed at tracking Olympics buzz on the social network and becoming a conversation hub for fans around the world.

Produced in partnership with NBC the Games’ official broadcaster in the United States the page at twitter.com/#Olympics uses a combination of human curation and algorithms to collect relevant tweets from fans, media and athletes. The page can also be viewed by non-Twitter users looking to follow along.

The dedicated hub makes sense: Twitter said in a blog post Thursday that more tweets are already being sent about the London Olympics each day than were sent during the entire 2008 Olympics in Beijing. More than two-thirds of American Olympians are on Twitter, according to the company, and the build-up to the 2012 Games has sparked 100 times more tweets than the lead-up to the 2008 Games and 10 times as many tweets as the lead-up to Vancouver 2010.

The Olympics page isn’t the first time Twitter has launched a major hub surrounding sporting events, however. It announced a similar production with NASCAR at a joint press conference in May. Then, in June, Twitter on its own produced a social hub for the Euro 2012 soccer championships. The Olympics are the biggest event it has tried to tackle so far, but expect to see these pages become more and more common.

If  Twitter does indeed have designs on becoming something more resembling a media outlet which many suspect sports are a logical starting point. Sports moments dominate the tweets-per-second record book, and the network has become a go-to destination for breaking news and fan discussion during games.

Analytics Say the Hottest Olympic Sport Will Be…Women’s Gymnastics?

The most popular sport at the 2012 Summer Olympics will be women’s gymnastics, according to predictive analytics run by the popular American sports media site Bleacher Report. And it won’t even be close.

Bleacher Report analyzed web searches, searches on its own site and the performance of different Olympic themed articles and found that women’s gymnastics consistently attracted between five and 10 times more interest than the next most popular sports, including swimming, men’s basketball and track and field.

“It shocked us,” says Dave Finocchio, the site’s co-founder and vice president of content and product. “We’re basically going to cover women’s gymnastics like its the Super Bowl.” The site, which boasts more than half a billion pageviews per month, will have some 50 of its “featured columnists” covering the Games, Finocchio says.

Women’s gymnastics events are always popular during the Summer Olympics but to see them trend so far above other marquee events, according to Bleacher Report‘s research, is a big surprise. Finocchio was also surprised to see that readers who who found pre-Olympics gymnastics content on the site typically clicked through to four or five more related articles on the topic a higher rate than for other sports.

What does Finocchio credit with the typically NFL-crazed Bleacher Report audience’s surprising surge in interest around women’s gymnastics and the Olympics in general? Social media.

“My bias would have been that they aren’t as meaningful as they once were and have become less relevant,” he says. “But I really think social media has changed the game and made them much more relevant for more people. Social media has changed the way fans can interact with athletes they might not know about otherwise, and made them much more engaging. I think all the U.S women’s gymnastics competitors will become little mini-celebrities during the Games, partly because of that.”

Valve CEO: Windows 8 Is a ‘Catastrophe’ for Game Developers

Valve CEO Gabe Newell said the closed ecosystem of Windows 8 is a danger to game makers, and will dramatically hurt the openness of the PC gaming market.

In the remarks made Wednesday night in Seattle at the Casual Connect conference, Newell was reportedly upset about the way Windows 8 would effect PC game sales.

Windows 8 will come with a Windows Store included in the operating system, and Microsoft will take a 30% cut from developers on that store.

“Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PCs, and OEMs who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.” Newell said, according to BBC News.

Newell has a large investment in the open games marketplace. Valve’s own games marketplace, Steam, now boasts 2,500 titles from several different developers and publishers. Steam also has 40 million active users, and is a significant player in video game distribution on PCs.

When it comes to game marketplaces on the PC, Steam is the biggest player in town. Apple offers some games via the Mac App Store and Amazon’s PC and Mac software store has a number of titles as well but steam is the juggernaut.

Microsoft’s Windows Store could be real competition for Steam especially if Xbox integration could become a reality.

Moreover, Microsoft is going to require Windows RT devices such as ARM tablets to get software from the Windows Store, which means Steam will potentially be cut off from that market.

Newell, who worked on Windows himself for 13 years until he left to found Valve in 1996, said they would be exploring other options, such as Linux, to make Steam games available.

“We’ve been a free rider, and we’ve been able to benefit from everything that went into PCs and the internet,” he said. “And we have to continue to figure out how there will be open platforms.”