Starting Friday evening, people across the globe tuning into the Olympics Games will see the theatrics of the opening ceremonies, the helix etchings of blades on ice, the patriotism on the podiums. But a tireless group of self-described "research geeks" see the Olympics as something else entirely: a giant petri dish.

NBC, the U.S. television network that paid $820-million (U.S.) for the rights to broadcast the Games in the United States, has put almost as much thought into tracking viewer behaviour as covering the Games. The peacock is rolling out a massive research effort - the second of its kind for the U.S. broadcaster and the first during a Winter Games - to attempt to understand how audiences behave.

The network will gather mounds of data on every bit of Olympics-related minutiae that viewers consume. NBC will track across platforms: TV ratings, video-on-demand usage, viewing through personal video recorders, and traffic to its digital coverage on computers and mobile phones. The data will be analyzed to shape future content - and also, perhaps, to help persuade advertisers that the troubled network can still command attention from viewers in a fragmented media business.

"All the rules of the media business are being changed," said NBC's president of research, Alan Wurtzel. "We just have to understand how these various platforms interact, and how the consumer interacts with them."

NBC launched its tracking efforts in Beijing, calling it the "billion-dollar research lab" (NBC paid nearly that much for the broadcast rights to the Summer Games in 2008). This time around, the "research lab" has grown, with data coming in from about a dozen different ratings agencies. For the first time, in Vancouver, TiVo will submit data on time-shifted viewing habits. NBC hopes to show advertisers that recorded video hasn't ruined TV's effectiveness: The data will measure how often people press the fast-forward button, and which types of commercials keep their attention.

"The DVR transformed this business, changed people's viewing behaviour," Mr. Wurtzel said. "And it also changed the currency."

Mobile phones are another transformative technology, he said. In Beijing, NBC's research showed they were still too primitive to be used as media devices.

"What I'm looking for in this Olympics is to see mobile really take a significant place," he said. To track mobile use, NBC will gather data from telecom carriers.

It has also given out sophisticated phones to about 40 people. Each bit of Olympic programming has a code embedded in it; those phones will pick up the audio fingerprint and send it to the tracking company, iMMi, to record the habits of those people across the Web, mobile devices and television. It will give NBC a taste of how Americans are beginning to access data on their phones.

Combined with the rest of the data coming in from a range of agencies - TV ratings from Nielsen, video-on-demand use collected by companies such as Rentrak, surveys about the media experience from roughly 5,500 viewers - NBC will be able to cobble together a comprehensive picture of its viewers in the digital age.

"What we're doing really is weaving together a story," Mr. Wurtzel said. In Beijing, he gave that story a name: TAMI, the Total Audience Measurement Index. It was all part of what NBC called "the most ambitious single media project in history."

If that sounds familiar, there's a reason: The Canadian consortium, made up of CTVglobemedia Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc., which won the rights to broadcast the games here, has called its plans for Vancouver "the most ambitious media initiative in Canadian history.

It's not just a slogan the consortium has borrowed; it, too, is rolling out big research plans. Instead of TAMI, CTV-Rogers calls its research project CUME (pronounced k-YOOM), the Canadian Unique Multimedia Engagement index.

"We're like a little laboratory of our own," said Rob Dilworth, vice-president of research for the consortium.

Like NBC, the consortium will use data from the agency Omniture to track Internet usage, and will also give out portable meters to roughly 8,000 people to wear on their belts like pagers. Those will track where and when they see and hear about events. But the consortium doesn't have the research budget of NBC, so while industry estimates on radio and newspaper usage are available and some tracking of advertising effectiveness is part of the plans, it's far from a billion-dollar laboratory.

Still, Mr. Dilworth notes that CTV-Rogers has far more online content planned than the American network this time around - he projects some of the Olympics content will reach about 90 per cent of Canadians, one way or another - and this is a huge opportunity for both companies.

"There's so much learning we've done through this."

For NBC, there's an ironic twist to the plans: While it made a modest profit on its gigantic outlay for the Beijing Games two years ago, the network has projected that it will lose money in Vancouver, owing to a recession that shrivelled advertising budgets. If that happens, the second, ramped-up set of TAMI results could be one of the only valuable things it takes away from Vancouver.

None of that dulls Mr. Wurtzel's excitement.

"The reason I'm excited as a research geek is, these Olympics offer an opportunity that we never get," he said. "I really want us to be the smartest media company on the planet in terms of understanding the consumer, understanding how we can market and program and use these various technologies. So much of it is happening so quickly. It just takes a lot to catch up."