Nbc Sports

In launching his homegrown website eight years ago, Mike Florio, a West Virginia labor lawyer and sharp-witted football fan, created a way to give his two cents on the NFL. Now, NBC is going to pay him a lot more than that. The network is expected to announce today that it has formed a wide-ranging partnership with Florio's Profootballtalk.com -- known as PFT to its legions of readers -- with plans to make it a permanent feature at the top of the NBC Sports site.

Borrowing a component from its contract with the NFL, NBC announced Tuesday a one-year extension of its revenue-sharing deal with the NHL that will include "flex scheduling." Instead of having a set schedule next season, NBC in most cases will pick one game 13 days in advance to televise nationally on Saturday or Sunday over a nine-week period. The network will select from at least three games.

NBC announced Tuesday that it will devote more than 3,600 hours of coverage to the Beijing Olympics next summer, counting more than 2,200 online. The overall amount is more than the triple the 1,210 hours NBC devoted to the Athens Games in 2004. In fact, it is also considerably more than the 2,562 total hours for televised Summer Olympics by U.S. networks, dating to 1960, when CBS had 20 hours of coverage from Rome.

NBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics in Turin got off to a slow start in the weekend TV ratings. Friday's opening ceremony drew an average of 22.2 million viewers at any one time, according to figures from Nielsen Media Research. That's less than half the average audience that watched the opening of the Salt Lake City Games on NBC in 2002, and it was down 18% from CBS' telecast of the Nagano Games in 1998.

A freelance TV producer who plagiarized passages from "The West Wing" has been let go by NBC Universal Sports, the network said Thursday. A short feature broadcast on NBC before the Kentucky Derby on Saturday praised a horse trainer who led three children to safety after a plane crash. The script said that trainer Michael Matz "ran into the fire to save the lives of three children." The narrator paused dramatically and said, "ran into the fire."

Can recording artist Pink and "Star Wars" composer John Williams do for "NBC Sunday Night Football" what country music star Hank Williams Jr. did for ABC's "Monday Night Football" with his rowdy and now indelible "Are You Ready for Some Football"? NBC will announce today that the opening song on its NFL telecasts will be sung by the two-time Grammy-winning Pink and that the ensuing theme music has been written by film composer Williams, an 18-time Grammy winner.

When NBC needed someone to write the theme music for its NFL coverage, the network turned, naturally, to a man who has never been to a pro football game. Look at it this way: John Williams hasn't flown an X-wing fighter through space or outrun dinosaurs, and he still wrote memorable soundtracks for "Star Wars" and "Jurassic Park." Truth is, there's no better choice to score America's Sport than America's Composer. For the last 30 years Williams has provided the background music for our lives.

As Jerome Bettis walked out of the NBC studios in Burbank where Jay Leno tapes his show, four youngsters thrust football cards at the former Pittsburgh Steelers running back, begging for his autograph. The youngest, about 6 years old, was holding four Bettis cards. "Pick one," Bettis said. It was nearly a minute before the small hand gave one to the imposing 5-foot-11, 255-pound Bettis, who signed, paused, then grabbed the other three cards and signed them as well.

Question: Which of these is not like the others? A) Olympics; B) NFL; C) U.S. Open; D) Notre Dame Answer: When NBC and Notre Dame renewed their contract to televise home football games in June, NBC's Dick Ebersol compared Fighting Irish football with A, B and C, claiming all of the above defined the network's sports. It's about branding, and America's college football brand is Notre Dame. That status entitles it to a presumably bailout-esque broadcast deal.

With the upcoming U.S. Olympic trials in track and field, gymnastics and diving, and the Wimbledon tennis championships, the distribution of sports programming on multiple levels will be available on a wide scale. This week, NBC Sports and World Championship Sports Network, which provides streaming video of Olympic sports year-round on the Internet, teamed up to create Universal Sports. Network executives hope that a combination of NBC's expertise in directing, production and distribution, and WCSN's online Olympic sports programming will make Universal Sports an Olympic sports fan's favorite, especially after the Summer Games in Beijing.