For the first time in Olympic history the Olympic Games will be broadcast by the IOC online and available on YouTube, the massively popular video-sharing site owned by search-engine giant, Google. The Video On Demand (VOD) clips will start on August 6. The IOC's channel will be available at www.youtube.com/beijing2008, But will be blocked within each territory served.

In this move the IOC is to lure a younger more global audience and to reach 77 territories across Africa, Asia and the Middle East where no broadcast TV rights have been secured. The Olympic Committee own statistics show that during the 2004 Games in Athens the average viewer was over 40 years old. Clearly not much interest from the video-game iPod generation.

Comscore reinforced this audience shift by announcing that in May the number of videos viewed in the US online reached a staggering 12 billion hits, a 45 percent increase over last year and over a third of which were seen on Youtube!

The reasons why there has been a big demographic change in the average age of the viewers are many. Kids today have far more choices available to them than there parents generation, where such events would be enjoyed by families of all generations. Today, with easy and affordable access to their own dedicated entertainment the Olympic Games appear to hold little interest with many of todays youth.

There is also a lack of emphasis on athletics as a major spectacle on television in the US. Media companies and advertisers push baseball, football and basketball where big time money and sponsorships create the sporting celebrities of today. The games have also suffered from a certain lack of credibility with accusations and confessions by athletes testing positive for 'doping'—taking performance enhancing steroids—and subsequently being banned and having to return medals. The notion of pure unfettered sportsmanship harkens to a bygone era.

Ask most kids today who holds the 100m sprint record and I doubt many would know, or even care.

NBC is banking on big audience numbers with 3,600 hours of television on the sporting menu, three times the number shown for Athens in 2004, of which a third will be streamed live over the internet. Hopefully, this time the coverage will focus on the full spectrum of live competitive events, including the heats and not the tedious background interviews and histories of various homegrown hopefuls followed by the tape delayed broadcast of the inevitable outcome.

Let the YouTube Games begin.