ABSTRACT
From the introduction of television at the Berlin 1936 Olympic Games to its transformation into 3D broadcasting at London 2012, media innovation has always surrounded the Olympics (Miah & Garcia 2012). As such, the broader context of a debate about London 2012’s new media production must be situated within the Olympic industry’s wider relationship with the media, where exclusive contracts with television broadcasters and the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s commitment to reaching the widest possible audience have been key to its financial stability over the last 30 years (Payne 2006). Yet the new media story of the Olympics is still relatively new, with Atlanta 1996 being the first Games to even have a website (Toohey & Warning 2000). In less than 20 years, the world has seen the rise and fall of the dot-com era and the growth of Google, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress and Vimeo, to mention just a few. The web has shifted from a point-and-click static, Web 1.0, html environment, to a dynamic, xml, Web 2.0 architecture, where content can be republished, shared and embedded elsewhere at the stroke of a touchpad.
