CANADA

CANADA

The Vancouver Sun, Feb. 17: NBC Universal’s online coverage of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver illustrates both the opportunity and the challenge that the Internet presents for traditional media companies. In addition to airing 835 hours of live and tape-delayed events, recaps and highlights on five broadcast and cable networks, the company is offering more than 400 hours of live video and more than 1,000 hours of full-event replays online. That’s a huge advance in volume from the previous Winter Olympics, but a sharp pullback from the breadth of online coverage at the Beijing Summer Games in 2008. Of the 15 sports contested in Vancouver, NBC is providing live streams on the Web of only two: hockey and curling.

Blanket coverage

It doesn’t have to be that way. The network’s cameras are ubiquitous on the Olympic grounds, and it could use the virtually unlimited capacity of the Internet to provide blanket coverage. But NBC is holding back largely because it doesn’t want to cut into its prime-time audience. Like its broadcasting rivals, NBC Universal generates more advertising dollars from the people tuned to its TV networks than the ones watching on the Net.

But in trying to guard against the erosion of their prime-time audience, networks may be doing themselves a disservice. For one thing, they miss the chance to reach new viewers who weren’t going to be tuning in on their TVs anyway.

And so far, at least, the programmers who’ve been most aggressive online have been the most successful on TV as well. Experience shows that avid viewers online and on mobile networks are also avid viewers of prime-time TV.

The sooner they close the gap between the Web and TV, the fewer opportunities they’ll miss.

BRITAIN

The Guardian, London, Feb. 17: If The Beatles had named their last recorded album Everest after their recording engineer’s brand of cigarettes, as it is said they wanted to do, fewer people would have heard of EMI’s Abbey Road studios, but there would still be reason to lament their likely sale.

Perhaps the heavily produced sound of the Beatles’ Abbey Road has become too familiar, and that cover photograph of the Fab Four on the zebra crossing has been made very tired by repetition, but the studio deserves its place at the center of British recorded music history.

Bach’s cello suites

Long before postmodernist critics were reviewing rock bands alongside Schnittke, Noel Coward and Artur Schnabel were both recording at Abbey Road. Abbey Road was where Pablo Casals recorded Bach’s cello suites at the height of the Spanish civil war, as well as where The Beatles made their name with “Please Please Me.”

ISRAEL

Ha’aretz, Tel Aviv, Feb. 16: Israel should heed the friendly warning it received from the Obama administration, which opposes a pre-emptive Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, warned in Tel Aviv of the unexpected consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran, just as he did during the days of the Bush administration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Qatar that Iran’s neighbors, who are worried about its nuclear plans, must rely on the American defense umbrella.

Atomic bomb

Both Israeli and Iranian leaders have escalated the threats they have been exchanging over the past few weeks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Auschwitz about a new Amalek. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad that if Israel goes to war, “we need to put an end to the Zionist regime once and for all.” And last week, on the anniversary of the Iranian revolution, Ahmadinejad announced that Iran will enrich uranium to 20 percent and declared that his country is capable of building an atomic bomb.

In these circumstances, the U.S. administration was right to send its senior officials to the Middle East in an attempt to calm both Israel and the Arab nations who are afraid of the Iranian nuclear threat.

U.S. President Barack Obama, after failing in his attempts at dialogue with Iran’s leaders, has toughened his stance and is now trying to recruit international support for harsher sanctions against Iran.