Steve Ferguson woke up early on Friday—3 a.m. to be exact — to watch his stepdaughter Margaux Isaksen, a 16-year-old Olympian, complete a grueling 11-hour performance in the modern pentathlon.
Ferguson did not watch Margaux compete in person. From his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, he watched a live stream of her sport on NBCOlympics.com, where 2,200 live hours of the Summer Olympics were shown for Internet users.
The ratings for NBC’s television coverage of the Games were record-breaking this month. But the extent to which the Internet served as a supplement to televisionwas unprecedented, and there were two clear winners: NBC’s own Web site and Yahoo’s Olympics section.
Benefiting from the growth in broadband Internet access, NBCOlympics.com served up more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million video streams through Saturday, more than doubling the combined traffic to its site during the 2004 Games in Athens and the 2006 Games in Turin. The popularity of the sitewill very likelymake digital rights more significant in next year’s bidding for the 2014 and 2016 Games.
As this Olympics demonstrated, the Internet turns the action into a digital version of the ‘‘Choose Your Own Adventure’’ children’s books, where every sport can receive its time in the spotlight.
Enjoy cycling? NBC had 90 videos of the competitions by Sunday. Prefer softball? Yahoo had 186 photos. The Internet is ‘‘allowing people to create their own broader Olympics experience,’’ said Jon Gibs, the vice president for media analytics at Nielsen Online.
During previous pentathlons, Ferguson would sometimes have to wait until a Wednesday to see Margaux’s performances from the prior weekend.
‘‘It’s really nice to have this available,’’ he said of the streaming video, even though his connection at home was somewhat slow.
NBC, as the holder of U.S. rights to the Olympics, was the sole source for online video and the only media organization that could use the Olympics logos.
But Yahoo, which offered a feature- oriented mix of news stories and slide shows, gave NBC a run for its online advertising money, or at least audience, attracting just as many visitors, according to Nielsen.
‘‘The demand that we’re seeing has far exceeded even our wildest expectations,’’ said Jimmy Pitaro, the head of sports and entertainment for Yahoo.
Olympics sites operated by AOL, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, the Beijing Organizing Committee, The New York Times, and USA Today also had high levels of traffic, according to Nielsen.
They differentiated themselves from the NBC site by offering slice-of-life features and entertainment stories.
(The top Olympic story on Yahoo this month was, ‘‘Why divers always take showers.’’) NBC cites statistics that showits site had a clear advantage over Yahoo’s. But Nielsen Online’s numbers show that Yahoo drew an average of 4.7 million unique visitors a day through Aug. 18, compared with 4.3 million for NBC.
The third-ranked site, AOL’s Olympics section, had 1.3 million visitors a day.
NBC, treating the Olympics like a research laboratory, says it is gleaning information about how people preferred to consume content from its combination of television, online and mobile offerings.
Critics charge that because the network did not stream the most popular sporting events live, its findings are skewed. Regardless, the network is using the Olympics to assert that TV is the preferred medium of consumers, with the vast majority of viewing — 93 percent—done via television.
Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC, concluded that many NBCOlympics.com visitors used the Web site as a video playback device.
‘‘People want to catch up on events that they miss,’’ he said during a conference call Aug. 13.
NBC’s most popular video from Beijing, with 2.3 million views, was the U.S. swimming team’s 4x100 relay on Aug. 11 featuring Michael Phelps’s second gold medal victory.
On Friday, the research firm eMarketer estimated that NBC had earned $5.75 million in revenue from online video ads, a tiny proportion of the $1 billion in total Games revenue.