(BEIJING, August 20) -- The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games "looks to be the biggest broadcast event in the Olympic history," announced Timo Lumme, director of television and marketing services for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), at a press conference held in the Main Press Center (MPC) on Thursday morning.

　　There are around 5,000 hours of coverage for the Beijing Games, an unprecedented amount of Olympic sports content available to IOC's rights holding broadcast partners located in 200 plus countries and territories around the world. Not to mention the triple increase in the total output of Olympic coverage in comparison with the Athens Games.

　　There were "a staggering 842 million people in China who tuned in to watch some coverage of the Opening Ceremony. The Opening Ceremony in general, surpassed the Sydney and the Athens Opening Ceremony in the major markets from various parts of the world," said Mr. Timo Lumme.

　　Last weekend, in the U.S., the IOC's Olympic partner NBC registered the largest Saturday night audience since 1990 -- over 40 million viewers tuned in to watch Michael Phelps win his record-breaking 8th gold medal in one Olympic Games.

　　In China, over 1 billion people have watched one or more Olympic sports programs. To cater to the increase in demand, CCTV, the International Olympic Committee's broadcast partner in China, has added two more channels to cover Olympic competitions, making a total of 9 TV networks that are solely dedicated to Olympic broadcasts.

　　The Beijing 2008 Games are also the first Olympic Games to offer world-wide digital media coverage. This digital coverage includes live broadband internet broadcasts, online high definition signals, and mobile phones clips. In comparison, there were only eight territories that experimented with delayed internet coverage during the Athens Games.

　　The International Olympic Committee's US partner NBC Olympics.com is receiving 30 times more video views online than it did in Athens and 12 times more mobile phone clip downloads than it did for the Torino 2006 Winter Games. In China alone, during the first 12 days of competition, 102 million people watched live broadcasts of the Games online, with another 146 million people watching online video on demand or delayed online coverage.

　　"The IOC has launched its own online channels to broadcast the Beijing Games," Mr. Time Lumme informed the media. These channels reach 77 territories across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including countries such as India, the Republic of Korea, Nigeria and Indonesia. This marks the first time that the International Olympic Committee has produced footage that is directly available to the public. The Olympic Games broadcast coverage is also accessible to more people in more territories than ever before.

　　Online information demands have created record website traffic, on both the IOC's and the Beijing Organizing Committee's (BOCOG) official websites. There were more visitors to the IOC site in the first week of the Beijing Games than for the whole of the Athens Games.

　　"We expected a global reach of approximately 4.5 billion people," Mr Time Lumme said. "It is the mission of the IOC to make sure that we exposed the Olympic Games, make available the Olympic Games coverage to as many people, as much as possible, around the world."

　　In locations such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, IOC's broadcast partners, the African Union of Broadcasting and the Caribbean Broadcasting Union, have more than doubled the amount of available coverage offered in the Athens Games.