My two cents.

For those of us who had the misfortune of watching the Atlanta Olympics on American television, it was hard to imagine anything more aggravating than the NBC coverage. (Perhaps the NBC coverage of the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona?)

This Olympics abuse on U.S. TV has got to stop. Delta Airlines offered better Olympics coverage on its onboard TV service!

I organized an overseas trip to coincide with parts of the Olympic Games so that l could watch them on European TV. I even went to Atlanta for some of the events (events that NBC never mentioned). Ultimately, though, the NBC coverage of the Olympics caught up with me.

One can forgive NBC for forgetting that the Olympics are an international event. After all, viewers in Peoria are only interested in watching sports in which Americans compete. German or French gold medalists spell ratings disaster However, NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol objects to such assessments. He's been quoted as saying, "half of the profiles we aired were on foreign atheletes."

But there were other problems with NBC's treatment of the Atlanta Games, beyond even the taped time-delayed coverage. According to someone who kept score, for every five hours of Olympic TV coverage, NBC devoted one hour to the actual sporting events; the remainder of the time went to commercials, promos and the annoying everpresent "human interest stories." Now, I'm refraining from calling these human interest stories stupid, because apparently they generated a ratings windfall for NBC. Not for nothing did NBC officials call the Olympics "human dramas around sports."

NBC must also be commended for its innovative camera technology, which brought viewers closer to the little action that it did broadcast. But the fact remains that while Japan, for example, carried 600 hours of Olympic coverage, NBC showed roughly 172 hours, airing only a fraction of the 28 disciplines. Thus when NBC paid $456 million for the Atlanta Olympics, it paid $2.65 million per actual sporting hour.

I'm aware that this is a recurrent topic of mine, but this time I have a solution to go with the complaints. Given that the International Olympic Committee cannot currently tell NBC or any other broadcaster what to show on the TV screen, here's my answer to the problem:

When the Americans bid for the broadcasting rights to the 2012 Summer Olympics, the winner should select the events it wants to show and then give those events full coverage. The second runner-up should make its selection from the remaining events, followed by the third runner-up, and so on until every event is assigned to a broadcaster. Fees would decrease according to the order of selection.

After all, during these Games, Atlanta Olympic Broadcasting - a division of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games - fed more than 3,000 hours of raw sound and video signals for 271 events to some 178 international broadcasters (197 countries participated in the Games). Under my proposed plan, the U.S. broadcasters who lost the main bidding to NBC could have tapped into that pool, offering the American public real Olympic coverage.

Meanwhile, you might ask, what about the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia? For those and four more Olympic Games, NBC paid $3.57 billion ($705 million for the 2000 Games, $793 million for the 2004 Games, $894 million for the 2008 Games and the balance for the 2002 and 2006 Winter Games). It is likely that NBC will try to recoup part of this license fee by again using pay-TV services. If sports in general generates 10 percent of total television advertising revenues in America, Olympic rights fees cannot be covered via free broadcasting alone. Indeed, NBC lost a lot of money on the Olympiads in Moscow, Seoul and Barcelona, although it may have made some money in Atlanta. An alternative solution to pay-TV services - which so far have not generated large revenues from Olympiads - would be to resell the TV rights to unwanted events to other broadcasters, thus hastening the delivery of real Olympic coverage, which otherwise could not begin in the U.S. before 2012.

Just in case, I'm planning to watch the Olympic Games from 2000 to 2008 in Europe, where the TV rights went to the EBU for $1.44 billion.