When ABC pre-empted early coverage of the third round
of the British Open to follow the developing story regarding
John F. Kennedy, Jr., the "gap was being filled by live
coverage of the tournament on the Open's official Web site,"
according to Chris Lewis of GOLFWEEK, who writes the
"unparalleled set of circumstances ... may have far-reaching
effects on the business of tournament broadcasting." From
9:00-10:30am ET, the tournament's site at www.opengolf.com
was the "only place" in the U.S. "to hear, and to some
extent see, early third-round action." The site "webcasted
the BBC's words and images" all weekend long and "plenty of
American fans took advantage." Preliminary reports from
London-based TWI Interactive (TWII), the company "relaying"
the BBC's coverage through the site, "indicated a surfeit of
early Saturday traffic, much of it from the" U.S. TWII
Technology Manager Ian Wood said the site was receiving
"close to five or six hundred page views per second" during
the non-coverage by ABC. Wood estimated a final daily
average of 25 million page views on the site, and Lewis
compares that to pgatour.com, which averages an "estimated"
32 million page views per month (GOLFWEEK, 7/24 issue).
