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NBC’s online coverage of the Summer Olympic Games is expected to be immense in both the quantity of live and on-demand video. But it appears there will be exceptions made for watching August’s events in Beijing through a Web browser.

As David Bauder of the AP describes it, NBC will be offering roughly 2,200+ hours of live competition online. That in addition to live blogging services, as well as 3,000 hours of replays. Quite a lot of of material, yes? Absolutely. More than you could possibly view while maintaining a semi-normal lifestyle.

There is a particularity some sport fans might should be aware of, however. NBC will not offer for computer users live video of any events also delivered live via traditional TV broadcast methods.

So, say you look upon the Olympic schedule and see that cycling or track and field events are occurring in real-time. And they get shown on NBC stations. That means you with your Web browser and requisite Microsoft Silverlight plugin will need to wait until after the statistics come in. Because NBC doesn’t want to encroach on its decades-old territory, evidently.

Not to call this inconsistency substandard to NBC’s televised coverage, since it’s only logical to think NBCOlympics.com will provide a much broader view of competition in China later this summer. But the disallowance of continuous live coverage on the Web, regardless of what is and what is not shown on television in the US, is patently absurd.

Are NBC and its affiliates somehow convinced that a shut-off of live broadcasts over the Web will drive those viewers to turn on their televisions - if they even have them within reasonable distance - to continue consuming the network’s feed? A very peculiar assessment of viewers’ inclinations indeed.

Of course, viewers aren’t likely show popular frustration with NBC for this, unless it is brought to very public attention in the final weeks preceding the games. The sheer volume of video offered via the Web, I suspect, will diminish the impact of any disruptions to Web feeds. Which is quite unfortunate for Olympic fans eager to consume live events by way of their computers.

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NBC’s Online Olympic Channel: Will Costs Outweigh Rewards?
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If you are a .Mac subscriber, Apple appears to have activated the corresponding @me.com email addresses. If your email address was [email protected] previously, you can now use [email protected] and emails should arrive in your .Mac mailbox. In the ne...

What is Facebook really worth? We know it's not worth $15 billion -- earlier this week a federal court, ruling on the ConnectU case, confirmed that the company has already placed a different value on its shares than the one they publicly announced as part of last fall's Microsoft deal.

Now Mike Arrington reports that Bill Dagley, a California money manager, is repping a seller with a block a stock they're willing to part with at a "value far less than $15 billion." He then cites a source that says the valuation Dagley's client is looking for is in the $3 billion to $4 billion range.

Sound plausible? It does to us. We've heard a different but similar version of the story from "Stone", a prolific and anonymous SAI commenter, for a while. The last time that Stone threw this one out -- this week -- he asserted that the valuation was "less than $4 billion for sure."

And now, prompted by Arrington's report, we've heard from a different source -- this one we know, but have agreed not to identify -- who says that in April, he was offered a 0.25% stake for $12.5 million -- a $5 billion valuation. Our source, who didn't move forward with the deal, says they weren't approached by Bill Dagley but by a Facebook employee, inquiring on behalf of another Facebook employee.

So either said Facebook employee is now working with Dagley, or there are multiple Facebook shareholders looking to unload shares for 2/3rds or less of the $15 billion number the company boasted about last fall. We'd bet on the latter.

See Also: It's Official: Facebook Not Worth $15 Billion

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Remember that touchscreen Motorola Blaze we'd mentioned a while back that was on the hook to get Verizon's visual voicemail service? It may not be in Verizon stores yet, but it's all up in Boy Genius Report's labs with a dark red body, MING attitude, and almost limitless mediocrity on board. The touchscreen apparently requires ridiculous amounts of effort to actuate, and that problem is compounded by a lame on-screen keyboard that makes texting tricky at best. EV-DO Rev. A is cool and all -- and the visual voicemail support should be a pretty popular add-on feature -- but that giant Motorola logo up front with the red ring and three pounds of chrome leaves the Blaze with a face only a mother could love. Let's hope Verizon's positioning this one as its low-end touchscreen offering, because we're not seeing it cha-chinging many registers otherwise.

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In the 2008 race, the most attention-grabbing attacks are coming from people outside the political world.

Citizens and celebrities join forces to rid their city of new breed of menacing snappers by fair means or foul

Broadcaster, 45, London

Peter Preston: Hire Boston Consulting to tell you how to organise your mini-empire and they naturally ask a first, vital question. Who do you want to be in charge, sir?

Peter Preston: What gives local newspaper editors pain? The thought of Ofcom letting the BBC spend £68m of licence fee money on setting up hyper-local internet video sites