Will NBC’s Olympic Research Be Golden?

NBC will be mining 3,600 hours of coverage from the upcoming Olympics in an attempt to figure out how people are consuming the games beyond traditional oldteevee. Our question is, If NBC is delaying the webcasting of the most popular events until after they’ve aired on television, isn’t the network missing out on a golden opportunity to really compare old and newteevee?

NBC is partnering with Nielsen Media Research to implement the total audience measurement index (TAMI). According to The New York Times:

TAMI will provide standard raw data about viewers, unique online users and time spent on sections of nbcolympics.com. Mr. Wurtzel [president of NBC research] plans to provide daily glimpses of Internet demographics, consumer preferences for video on computers and mobile devices, and how the Internet complements TV viewing. The results, he said, may help advertising efforts for the 2010 and 2012 Olympics.

If the goal is to get advertisers to pony up for future games, why hobble the online component and potentially diminish that audience? With younger audiences shying away from oldteevee for the web, it seems like being able to boost those metrics would serve the network better in the long run.