Google covers the Olympics

So you're a sports nut who lives in Nigeria or Indonesia, but you've never used Google or YouTube before? Get ready to change all that. Google hatched an agreement with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), enabling its YouTube subsidiary to broadcast Olympic coverage in 77 countries starting with the opening ceremonies on Aug. 8. The move is bound to improve Google/YouTube's visibility--and usage--worldwide.

Unfortunately, those 77 countries don't include the U.S., U.K., Canada and several others. The IOC said its IOC Channel will be available on YouTube only in territories where digital video-on-demand rights have not been sold or acquired on a non-exclusive basis.

But the news isn't all about YouTube. Google has also begun showing a new 'onebox' as part of its results for Olympics-based search queries, Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen notes. In the onebox, which is a special result integrated into organic Google search results, users get a list of the upcoming events for the sports category, all linked to Beijing2008.cn. So even if U.S. residents can't watch on YouTube, they can quickly find the event they're interested in and tune into to NBC's exclusive Olympic coverage.

And that's another place Google is placing a bet. While the NBC Olympic site is run on Microsoft's Silverlight, Google's DoubleClick will be serving up all the ads within the Silverlight applications. The upshot? It looks like the competition for Olympics hearts and minds will be happening online, as well as in Beijing.

UPDATE: Google has also created 3D models of the Olympic Village, available in Google Earth, to allow people to see the general location and perspectives of the venues and stadiums throughout Bejing. Take a spin.

• Google
• IOC
• Microsoft
• NBC
• Olympics
• on-demand
• onebox
• search
• Silverlight
• video
• YouTube