The BBC coverage of the Winter Olympics this year was extensive compared to that provided previously, but most of the events are considered to be fringe sports in Britain, that get little coverage outside of the Olympics - even the ones that Britain has a reasonable chance of winning a medal in. In Sweden however, winter sports are part of the national tradition and events such as cross country skiing and biathlon (cross country skiing with guns) are covered live every weekend in shows that run, in some cases, for hours.

Reflecting this level of national interest, in order to provide maximum coverage of all events at the Winter Olympics, the Swedish state broadcaster, SVT, gave web viewers direct access to the host broadcaster's video feeds and delivered them, over the Internent, without commentary directly to anyone in Sweden who wanted to see them. The image below shows the web stream of the live main event shown on terrestrial TV, but also has links to two events, an ice hockey semi final and a biathlon race, that are shown live online without commentary, marked with "okommenterad".

The idea of letting web viewers get access to feeds that normally would have been deemed too fringe to make it to broadcast combines two interesting ideas, one borrowed from retail and made famous in a book by Chris Anderson called the Long Tail, and the second being the Good Enough Revolution coined in a Wired article by Robert Capps. In short, the Long Tail theory describes a strategy where selling a large number of niche items in relatively small quantities can provide a customer base as large and lucrative as a traditional approach of selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The Good Enough Revolution puts a name on the idea that the most expensive, complex and professional way of doing things is not always the best, sometimes it is just as good, or better, to move towards a simplified and easier product or service.

Obviously the Olympic ice hockey semi final in the example below is not a cheap and simple production, but from SVT's perspective the additional cost of providing another raw stream online is low and from a viewer's perspective a match without commentary is simplified and "good enough". Despite this simplification the content can still be attractive to a small number of viewers and if many events can be provided this way at low cost, then the effect can be likened to the Long Tail. Taking the idea a bit further, it is easy to see how something like the Sky Sports FanZone commentators could be combined with a web-only stream that otherwise would not have professional -- or dare we say, traditional -- commentary to provide a "good enough" experience to viewers.

It will be interesting to see how keen other broadcasters and content companies will be on ideas like this one. Indeed, it is instructive to think about how approaches like this might be able to enable new business opportunities. Looking back to consider the core reason behind the success of media groups such as ESPN in the USA and BSkyB here in the UK, we get a very simple answer - access to sports. Admittedly those powerhouses are built on the back of billion-dollar licensing deals for incredibly popular Premiere League and NFL content, but both also provide access to a lot of niche and specialist material which has a small, but significant viewership - an effect of the Long Tail at work again.

Consider for a moment the three unrelated factors of - the enduring popularity of local sports such as Sunday local-league football; the speed of technical innovation which allows simple but powerful, remote operated cameras to be used for near-broadcast quality acquisition; and a local and regional press which everyone believes to be in rapid decline. Perhaps as well as bringing a greater variety of international sporting coverage to our screens, this kind of "good enough" approach could also be used to good effect by local media groups by enabling them to engage with their customers by providing a new level of access to something that many local communities are passionate about - their local teams, and their local sporting heroes.