THIS column is being filed later than usual and it’s the Olympics what’s to blame. No I’m not in Beijing befuddled by smog, but behind my desk in New York and for the past 20 minutes I have been searching fruitlessly for live coverage of the opening ceremony.

I can’t find anything except photographs. Looks like I’ll have to wait until this evening - Friday - when NBC starts airing its Olympic coverage. Where is the internet when you need it?

NBC Universal, owned by GE, paid more than $900m (€599m) for exclusive US rights to the event and is reportedly already on track to pay that off and more in advertising despite a slowdown in spending on advertising. The big gamble this year is on how well NBC does on the net.

In a memo to staff recently, Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal’s chief executive, has described this Olympics as “the most ambitious broadcasting event ever attempted”.

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The scale of the broadcaster’s plans are truly olympian. Over the 19 days of competition, the company is presenting 3,600 hours of coverage and a further 2,200 hours will be streamed live on the net. At the winter Olympics two years ago, one hockey match was available online. Thanks to the explosion in technology in the last four years, these Games will be watched like no other.

Viewers are as likely to watch on their laptops as their television sets, and advertisers looking to measure an audience increasingly want to know where that audience is, as well as who and how many. To try to measure its audience, NBC has created the Total Audience Measurement Index, or TAMI, which combines research from Nielsen, Omniture, Rentrak and other ratings to give advertisers an idea of how many viewers or users are watching Olympic coverage on their phones, cable TV, online and on broadcast TV.

In the dog days of August, no doubt, many people watch the Olympics on the sly at the office - not like me, I was doing research, honest - but if they’ve seen Michael Phelps splash home to his 999th gold while they were supposedly working on the Jenkins Account, will they bother to tune in to watch it later on TV? And - the really big question - how much will it matter to NBC if they don’t?

Planned events don’t get bigger or more universal than the Olympics. The web viewership for NBC should be huge and will give online advertisers a massive audience as well as the media firm a huge platform for advertising its other shows and movies. If TAMI finds that the web doesn’t damage broadcast ratings, this could be the moment when TV stops fighting the net. But it’s a big if.

NBC has made its money back on TV ads - a 30-second spot going for $750,000 this year. Come the next Olympics even more money will have flown online and away from TV. Prices online may or may not have risen by then, but they are unlikely to have reached the dizzy heights TV broadcasters demand.

If people watch the Games online and then don’t tune in their TVs, broadcasters are in big trouble, they just can’t make that sort of money on the web. Until they can, America will have to wait for prime time for the Games to begin.

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