In 1984 at Los Angeles, the American ABC-TV network provided its facilities in order to produce an international signal for 156 different countries. It was an Olympics beset with boycotts, so it was fine that ABC used its limited resources to aim most of its cameras at American athletes. It was the final Summer Games covered by ABC in the U.S., and when NBC took over for Seoul 1988, there were differences of opinion between the Korean host broadcaster and the entity that was providing a healthy chunk of the Games' financing -- NBC had contributed $300 million in return for 179 hours of American coverage. Something within the system needed to change.

After Seoul, the International Olympic Committee amended its media guidelines to allow for a broadcast entity tied to the Games organizing committee, not the host country or its home broadcast rightsholder. The first independent organization was Radio Television Olimpica, which brought together a number of different national entities to create all-encompassing, multi-feed coverage of the Barcelona 1992 competitions.

For the first time in Olympic history, there were pictures from every single competition, every single second of action. National rightsholders such as NBC were permitted to have one or two cameras per venue to point at national athletes and mix in, but the raw feed was designed to be nation-neutral. And RTO helped set the stage for a television concept a decade ahead of its time, one of the most tragically misunderstood media enterprises in history. The very mention of its name recalls the Hindenburg, the Titanic and Ishtar all at once.

The Olympics Triplecast.

Last week, the American television network NBC announced that it had sold 90 percent of its record $1 billion ad inventory for its coverage of the Beijing Games. NBC will employ seven different networks to broadcast 3,600 hours of Olympic sports, by far the largest two-week undertaking in the history of media.

If you live in the United States and watched any significant portion of NBC's 1,210 hours of Athens 2004 coverage, you know full well that those 20 minutes out of every hour won't be filled with pitches from 3,600 different advertisers. The 30-second spots will run in tight and limited rotation, and the relentless repetition of those ads will, in some cases, leave more of a memory impact than the Games themselves.