Shortly before the Olympics began, an office in the Microsoft building on the outskirts of Sydney was transformed into an Internet broadcasting studio, complete with computer monitors, TV screens and presenter's desk.
With the very latest in Microsoft technology, it had the potential to be the most sophisticated interactive website ever to transmit Olympics events to the world's PC-owning masses.
"Streaming video has improved so much in the last four years that we can send pictures in real time," said one of the executives running the site, a joint venture between Microsoft and the US television network NBC and known as MSNBCSports.com.
Users of MSNBCSports.com get realtime results and updated medal tables and recaps presented by Tom Varrato, along with news, interviews, previews and interactive sectors on different sports.
Yet no live Olympics event pictures, and hardly any video clips of medal contests, have been transmitted to the two million unique users who log on to the site every day. Nor will they find them on any other open Internet site in the world.
In one respect these are the Olympics when the Internet came of age, with instant results and analysis. All major news organisations are providing at least a text results and commentary service, like The Irish Times whose Sydney 2000 site was rated the 10th-busiest in Europe on Wednesday - ahead of BBC and UK Yahoo - by Nielsen net ratings. By the end of the games, the official Olympics site www.olympics.com expects to register 700 million page views, which is 20 times the figure for Atlanta in 1996.
But the 2000 Olympics are destined to be remembered also for what they failed to achieve. Internet sites have been prevented by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from transmitting moving pictures of athletes in action, so as to protect the billions of dollars it receives in broadcasting rights from television companies. So there is none of the action-packed drama of the 27th Summer Games on the laptop or PC screen, no cheering on the team in the alcove off the living room, no nail-biting round the office computer screens.
Olympics fans in the United States have particular reason to feel aggrieved.
They are not even getting live Olympics pictures on television. NBC paid $2.3 billion for Olympics broadcasting rights in the US up to 2008, but is forcing viewers to wait 15 to 18 hours to watch recorded footage of events in prime time, rather than early in the morning when they take place in Sydney.
So while the Microsoft-NBC site at www.olympics.msnbc.com and NBC's own sports site www.nbcolympics.com probably offer the most comprehensive US results service in the brief history of the web, they are barred from providing what users desperately want - continuous live action.
NBC accounts for more than half the total money paid to the IOC for the rights to Sydney 2000, and can dictate the terms, and it has decided that the broadcasting of live video feed, even on its related sites, would undermine its prospects of attracting a big viewing audience for its evening highlights.
There are signs that the future is not far away, however. An Australian Internet company, Access 1, in a deal with Seven Network which has the television rights in Australia, is distributing live coverage over Access 1 satellite Internet service to businesses paying 59.95 Australian dollars n(£25) to run it on their computer networks.
NBC is providing a similar feed to Internet subscribers via a company called Axiant Communications, limited to 10 minutes of video a day and restricted to a small number of service-providers. These are not open Internet services but they could toll the bell for the old media. Television networks in future may have to license Internet rights or share them.
With the speed of developments in information technology, it is difficult to envisage that in 2004 there will not be live coverage with audio and video on home and office computers.
As Access 1 chairman David Spence said at the service's launch: "My advice to businesses is to push the Olympics on to the desktop of all your staff. They'll thank you for it by turning up to work."
