ADVANCES DON'T STOP NBC'S WAITING GAME.

Byline: TOM HOFFARTH The Media

Maybe it's just us, but without a high-speed internet connection, satellite television and radio, constant cellphone updates, a crawl running across the bottom of just about every TV program and at least one trusty TiVo, you're missing some of the interchangeable components of today's American media home center for those among us with the insatiable need to know.

Yet, night after night for the past two weeks, NBC asked us all to wait if we wanted to witnessed what happened at its Winter Olympics.

My mistake. The Games didn't actually belong to the network and its cable appendages. It only seemed that way.

To borrow a phrase from Howie Mandel, who seems to be NBC's new go-to guy, if we were backed us into a ``deal or no deal'' situation when it came to sticking around for the prime-time, pre-packaged fare that often pushed the limits of a good night's sleep, we more often than not opted for the latter.

What we regrettably came to realize - and in some ways, the Nielsen ratings exposed it - was not only that while much of our fast-food, urge-to- purge-old-news cohorts already digested the results from this nine-hour time warp, but, come the cocktail hour, they were contemplating the slew of other news and info-tainment options once NBC got around to rewinding its tape and expected us to all just sheepishly tune into Turin like some kind of Bode call.

Take the events of Thursday's women's figure skating finals as a not- ready-for-prime-time example.

For us, the day started like most with a check of NBCOlympics.com. It was the quickest, most efficient way to find out which events were still going on nine hours ahead, what had wrapped up, and what was ahead. A site so vital, even ESPN.com had agreed to have a link to it.

By about 1:15 p.m. PDT, Sasha Cohen took the ice for her long program. At that moment, NBC had ``Days of Our Lives.'' CNBC had ``The Closing Bell.'' MSNBC had ``The Abrams Report.'' USA Network had the movie ``Happy Gilmore.''

Online, the real-time list of leaderboard was updated. Within minutes, a picture of Cohen falling down from her routine was on the home page.

At 1:40 p.m., NBCOlympics.com reported that Japan's Shizuka Arakawa had vaulted past Cohen in the standings with three skaters left. At 1:50 p.m., Kimmie Meissner finished. At 1:54 p.m., Russia's Irina Slutskaya finished.

An Associated Press news alert at 1:59 p.m. announced the final results. At that moment, on USA Network, Bob Barker punched Adam Sandler.

A few minutes later on KSPN-AM (710), Gary Miller and D'Marco Farr aired a clip of Westwood One radio's Liz Manley doing the call of Cohen's fall, followed by an announcement of the medals. The news was definitely out.

Now fast forward about nine hours. If that's possible.

NBC showed Cohen taking the ice at 11:07 p.m. Slutskaya skated at 11:42 p.m. Tom Hammond announced the results at 11:47 p.m., followed by a brief podium ceremony and a final pithy remark or two from Bob Costas.

At 6:45 a.m. Friday, my wife awoke without knowing who won. She struggled, but admitted to falling asleep during Arakawa's performance.

What did happen? I had to think a moment. Seems like it happened two days ago, by now.

Don't worry, I said. It's all on TiVo, with the other hours of NBC prime- time Olympics shows and the episodes of the now-canceled ``Love Monkey'' that we haven't gotten around to watch and delete yet.

Once upon a time, the Olympics were without a doubt Destination TV. This time, if something ``better'' was on and there was still a unknown payoff - specifically, Fox's ``American Idol'' or ABC's ``Grey's Anatomy'' - all bets were off.

NBC will figure how to spin all this as a success after having spent $600-million-plus for the rights to televise these supposed public-domain athletic performances and hoard the video highlights for itself instead of sharing it (and thus exposing it, to drum up interest) with other networks. It guarantees no money will be lost on the deal, that it drew more viewers to its network during February sweeps, and it boosted exposure for its cable partners. For that reason, it's doubtful NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol will ever mess with the basic formula of presentation that started back in those stone-age days of pre-Internet and 50-channel cable systems.

For the next generation of TV viewers, this model will crumble. As more learn to navigate through all the technological breakthroughs coming at us from every direction, another tape-delayed Olympics can't possibly appease the masses keeping up to speed with the accelerated pace of news delivery mediums. Even if NBC did give us 400-plus hours to slog through.

Close your eyes and cover your ears? C'mon. Some holdouts might have mastered the art of delayed gratification, but you can't keep duping the rest of us.

By the way, NBCOlympics.com reported a single-day traffic record on Thursday - 29.7 million page views, passing the 29.2 million views from Day 3 on Feb. 13 and the 29 million views on the first day of the women's figure skating Tuesday. There were 5.54 million page views between 1 and 2 p.m. PDT Thursday, another high.

Through Thursday, NBCOlympics.com had already reached 315 million in page views and 7 million in video stream views, with three days remaining. At the Summer Games from Athens two years ago, they had 251.4 million page views. At the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, there were 145 million. See a trend? Enough so that NBC says it will also make a profit from its online presence - about $6 million, a first for any Olympic site to date.

Comparing Apples to Sonys, NBC also figures it will end up with more than 200 million total TV viewers for these Winter Games. Not bad, but since the start, the Los Angeles market wasn't leading the charge. It will end up far below the national ratings and rank about 48th of the 55 largest cities measured by Nielsen ratings.

If L.A. is supposed to be a trend-setting town, the network best stop finding more vehicles for Howie Mandel and focus on how it can make the Games important and compelling again by 2010, when the Winter Games from Vancouver are a Pacific time zone party.

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Photo:

Russia's Irina Slutskaya falls during the free skate early Thursday afternoon - a slip shown by NBC at nearly midnight.

Torsten Silz/Getty Images

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