The IOC is really missing out on a gold mine, and its too bad, because one simple move could be a win-win situation for all.

I’m talking about YouTube. Universal Sports is already on the bandwagon, and the IOC would do itself a tremendous favor if it would join in.

The YouTube of today is not like the YouTube of two years ago. There are more opportunities to control your content, and there are ways to make money off your content, at least for bigger companies like the Olympics.

I can see why the IOC wouldn’t want everybody posting Olympic YouTube videos up all over the Internet. They are very protective of their brand, and if anybody could embed Olympics programming on their web site, it might dilute their brand. The problem, however, is that they are not posting them up anywhere. If I want to see the award winning performances of Dorothy Hammel or the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics, I can’t; at least I’m not supposed to. There are some Olympics videos that sneak by and aren’t taken down for a while, but there is a lot of footage that is not available.

The IOC could post their videos on YouTube, disable embedding, and get more people interested in the Olympics. People like to browse on YouTube, and they like to search things that interest them. So in four years, when someone references Shawn White’s gold-medal winning halfpipe performance, people could look it up.

There are decades of Olympic videos just sitting in some vault that nobody has the opportunity of looking at. They aren’t selling videos of all this footage on Amazon.com; they might as well get some use out of it.

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