The Beijing Olympics is proving to be a huge hit for US broadcaster NBC. There has been huge interest in Michael Phelps’ swimming events, the men’s gymnastics and women’s beach volleyball.

An average of 29.7 million viewers watched the fourth night of the Beijing summer Games, about 2.5 million more than during the comparable night in Athens four years ago. The four-night average of 30.4 million is 5.7 million better than the Athens figure for the same period in 2004.

And with the revamped nbcolympics.com containing live event video and a deep archive of on-demand content, traffic on the Web site has already exceeded the total for 17 days in Athens. After four days, 13.5 million video streams have been downloaded, and 291.1 million pages have been viewed.

The total of 16.9 million unique users is 5.8 million more than in all of the Athens Games. NBC didn’t say how much time they’ve spent on the site.

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