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Bob Costas has a training program he undertakes before every Olympics. In the weeks and months leading up to the opening ceremonies, the veteran NBC broadcaster does an inordinate amount of reading. Even in the sporting world, where commentators are known for their ability to regurgitate the most arcane facts and figures, Mr. Costas stands out. Legend has it he once left a $3.31 tip at baseball legend Stan Musial's St. Louis restaurant – a baffling number, unless you know that the Cardinal's lifetime batting average was .331.

Heading to Beijing, Mr. Costas's pre-Olympic reading has taken him down what would seem like an unusual path: the 1960 Summer Games in Rome. Those Olympics were many things: Cassius Clay won gold there and the first modern-day doping scandal unfolded. But there's another reason 1960 has captivated those at NBC.

When CBS paid what seemed like a huge sum – $600,000 – for the broadcast rights to those games, Rome became the first commercially televised Olympics, giving way to what is now a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. Mr. Costas is one of many at NBC pinning their hopes on the promise that these Olympics, beginning in less than two weeks, will be just as significant for the Peacock Network. “It remains to be seen how these Beijing Olympics might change the world,” Mr. Costas said this week, addressing reporters via satellite from China. “I try to stay away from hype and overstatement.”

His bosses at NBC were far less circumspect, declaring the 17-day event “the most ambitious single media project in history.” The network will generate 3,600 hours of coverage spread across multiple TV channels, the Internet, cellphones, and cable video-on-demand platforms. It will also be the first Games shown entirely in high-definition, right down to the tiny lipstick tube cameras stuck in the archery targets.

At a time when network TV has seen its audiences splintered by the Internet, these Games represent network television's biggest effort to reverse that trend and reclaim lost viewers. But NBC's push comes as there are several fires to contend with. Demographics are turning against the big networks as their core audiences get older, and younger viewers opt to spend time online, a plight that has befallen all mass media, from newspapers to radio. And the role of the big networks as a cultural force is increasingly being usurped by upstart cable networks.

Numerous international networks, including CBC and TSN in Canada, have greatly expanded their coverage for Beijing, a function of online advances that have taken place in recent years. But more than anyone, NBC will be using the Games to make a statement about television: that it's not dying.

NBC plans to collect vast amounts of data from these Olympics, using at least five different ratings agencies, and the polling of thousands of viewers, to track how Beijing is consumed each day. It will tell the network how the future TV network needs to conduct itself in an industry where $76-billion worth of advertising is at stake.

“It's not widely known, but the reason NBC bought the 2008 Olympics for $1-billion was not for the programming, but to enable the research guys to go and figure out how people are [consuming] this cross platform stuff,” said Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC Universal. He was only half-joking.

“What this really is, is a billion-dollar research lab.”

The actual price paid was $894-million (U.S.), a record for the Games, and NBC will be doing everything to earn that back.

Just over an hour of footage aired each night from those Rome Olympics. NBC will churn out an average of 212 hours of content a day from Beijing, most of it available on-demand online. At that rate, it would take one person watching nine screens around the clock to consume it all.

“I think we may look back and see this was a very seminal time,” Mr. Wurtzel said.

Demographic shift

A little more than a month before Beijing – the Games begin on Aug. 8 – network television was dealt some unsettling news. The television viewer is getting older, and none of the major U.S. networks are escaping the trend.

The median age for the big networks – the point at which exactly half their audience is younger and half their audience is older, is now just one year shy of 50.

While mass media has all experienced an aging of its audience, with newspapers and radio being hit particularly hard, the demographic shifts for TV have proven the networks are no different. According to a study by Magna, a New York advertising and research agency, CBS has the oldest viewership, with a median age of 53, followed by ABC and NBC at 49 and 48, respectively. FOX, the home of younger-skewing programs, has seen its number rise from 34 to 43 in the past five years.

“Traditional television is no longer necessarily the first screen for the younger set,” said Steve Sternberg, Magna's executive vice-president.

Such data pose a problem for advertisers, the lifeblood of network television. A top show on one of the big networks once had the clout to pull in as many as 40 million viewers in the 1990s. NBC, with shows like The Cosby Show, Seinfeld and ER often led the pack. In fact the Peacock never really had to sweat, since one monster show always seemed to be replaced by another.

Today, the top shows on television are drawing only about half of that audience. And if the remaining viewers are statistically older, it means those 18 to 34 year olds that advertisers covet – because of their willingness to adopt new brands and spend disposable income – are now harder to find.

But advertisers say the big networks retain one major advantage over the Internet, and other media for that matter. TV is still the biggest game in town.

Despite spending close to $1-billion to get the broadcast rights to Beijing, for example, NBC expects to make a profit of at least 10 per cent, and the vast majority of that advertising revenue will be driven by the main network, rather than the online component of its Beijing coverage. When presidential candidate Barack Obama purchased $5-million worth of advertising inventory this week for the Games, the bulk of that was for TV time, not Internet space.

“Certainly for any advertiser who is looking for instant impact and the opportunity to communicate with millions of people at one specific point in time, network television is it,” said Hugh Dow, president of ad buying firm M2 Universal, which operates in Toronto and New York. “I think everybody realizes some of the challenges facing network television, but it continues to be a major component in literally every advertiser's media mix.”

New ways to count

Even though ratings have declined on TV, NBC isn't convinced its audience is necessarily shrinking. In fact, some inside the network, like Mr. Wurtzel, believe television is no longer counting its viewers the right way. TV is now watched via the Internet, cable on-demand services and through digital video recorders, but the industry still counts all of those separately.

To make his point, Mr. Wurtzel, the chief audience number cruncher at NBC, intends to unleash TAMI upon the industry and advertisers over the course of the Beijing Olympics. The acronym stands for Total Audience Measurement Index, and the network plans to produce extensive data each day, pulling in ratings from every platform and melding them into one big NBC number.

“If we can't research it, then we can't sell it, we can't program it. We don't know, sort of, what we are doing. So we've got to figure out a way to do this,” Mr. Wurtzel said. “I will be able to say to you, for example, that men 18-34 spend a huge amount of time on the [NBC website for swimmer] Michael Phelps, and woman were very interested in the results, medals, whatever it might be.”

The process hasn't been perfected yet, and the network expects glitches. It is drawing upon several data collection agencies to pull off the new system, including TV ratings mainstay Nielson Co., Web trackers Quantcast and Omniture, and video-on-demand data collector Rentrak. NBC will also be polling 8,500 people throughout the Olympics to compile data on their viewing habits.

Provided advertisers believe the numbers NBC produces each day, it will be the clearest picture yet of a modern television audience watching programs on whatever platform they choose. “This is something that has never been done before. We are really, really pushing the research envelope,” Mr. Wurtzel said. “We just couldn't afford to wait.”

There is speculation as to why NBC is in such a hurry to show that its TV audiences are bigger than the traditional ratings reflect. As its parent company General Electric faces pressure from shareholders and Wall Street to divest underperforming divisions, nothing is sacred. If GE would consider divesting its light bulb division – which the company was founded on – its TV network could just as easily be sold.

GE's chief executive officer Jeffrey Immelt has publicly denied the company wants to sell NBC, even though TV networks are seen by investors as lower-growth assets. However, GE's recent $3.5-billion acquisition of the Weather Channel (and its popular Internet properties) has stoked talk of a blockbuster media sale.

If there were ever an opportune time to get out of network television, the aftermath of a major Olympic push might be it.

However, Mr. Wurtzel said the effort is all about the data.

“I'll be honest, we charge advertisers a lot of money for the Olympics – and a pretty big premium,” he said. “We maintain it is the singular best environment for advertising that you can ever buy. But we feel an obligation to prove that.”

The ratings game

The challenges facing network TV can't solely be blamed on the Internet.

In any given month, roughly 162 million Americans go online. At the same time, 282 million Americans watch television, according to a recent survey by Nielson.

Back when NBC broadcast the Seoul Summer Olympics in 1988, its chief ratings concern was to make sure the Games didn't interfere with monster hits such as The Cosby Show (which thankfully for the network was in reruns at the time).

Such ratings goliaths are a lot harder to come by in today's TV industry. Cable is also a much greater threat.

That story played out last week with the announcement of Emmy nominations, which were dominated by several cable series. And it wasn't only the perennial award winner HBO (producer of The Sopranos) that got all the accolades.

AMC's advertising industry drama Mad Men, and FX's legal thriller Damages emerged with multiple nominations between them, proving that any channel with the ambition to act like a big network by producing its own shows can pull off the strategy.

It may have been a tipping point for network television.

“On cable, everything is just a number on the dial,” said Robert Lloyd, a television critic for the Los Angeles Times. “NBC is just a number, Bravo is just a number, and AMC is just a number. They're functionally equal to the television watcher.”

The evolution of AMC – owned by a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp. – is particularly interesting, since the little-known cable network has gone from a fringe channel that ran old movies to a producer of dramatic shows. The shift has affected the TV production industry as well, with writers and actors who don't want to work under the constraints of a big network moving to cable.

Such networks can spend more time developing shows, while increasingly NBC, CBS, ABC and FOX are looking for audience response in the first several episodes to justify keeping a new series around.

“Now that basic cable is starting to get into that game, the pressures on the networks have just been increasing as competition grows,” Mr. Lloyd said. “There was a time when shows on network TV got a third or even half of the whole viewing audience. Those numbers don't exist any more.”

All hands on deck

NBC's descent on Beijing will reach well beyond sports. It is a full-fledged network effort, intended to showcase the news operations and promote the prime-time lineup all at once.

Nearly all of NBC's top news shows will set up shop in China, producing three and a half hours of programming each day for The Today Show and NBC Nightly News. Anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw will broadcast from China, along with the network's health expert, Dr. Nancy Schneiderman, who will give daily updates on Beijing's “pollution story,” said Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports.

Personalities of the newly acquired Weather Channel will also be on the ground to report on the weather.

“If this becomes a news story, or a series of news stories other than the Olympic events, we are certainly ready to cover them,” Mr. Ebersol said.

When NBC broadcast a segment of The Today Show from Tiananmen Square recently, the sight of U.S. satellite trucks in China drew puzzled looks from onlookers. It is a long way from 1960, when reels of footage were loaded onto commercial airliners and flown back to New York each day, where CBS crews would splice together highlights and provide voice commentary.

It's all part of the new media challenge of creating original content in an age when Olympic results can be blasted to cellphones around the planet in a microsecond, and TV networks no longer enjoy a captive audience for major live events.

“How do you keep this fresh and interesting when the results are already in. I don't know how you do it when news is even more available now, outside of the exclusive TV contract,” said Fred Bayles, a communications professor at Boston University, who has covered six Olympics for the Associated Press and USA Today.

“I guess you tart it up the best you can.”

In an e-mail interview from Beijing yesterday, NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel said the company still believes in the mass reach of television, even if that reach now stretches beyond the TV screen onto computers and cellphones. TV, in whatever form it takes, remains king of the audience.

Just as Mr. Costas detests hype and overstatement, Mr. Zenkel insists NBC is serious about its claim.

“This is in every respect a massive, ambitious and, in many ways, unprecedented undertaking,” he said. “We've been calling this the single most ambitious media project in history and I don't think that's an overstatement.”

So even if the Beijing Olympics don't change the world, in the end, they will change television.