NBC has created a good Webcasting site, NbcOlympics.com, with some interesting innovations using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology and the promise of broadcasting live 2,200 hours.

However, the way to handle contents have exasperated a number of people. At least 700 hours of live events are not being webcast. And another 700 hours of the contests are taped and shown hours later on television. All of the broadcast events are available to replay on the Internet after they are aired.

NBC has said that it needs to keep the most popular events exclusive to television in order to serve the advertisers, affiliate stations and cable systems.

But the reality is more complicated, and the battle between the big business of network and the emerging medium of Web video is far from over.

NBC has released a research that shows how the Web and the network drive viewers to each other as people get caught up in the Olympics dramas of the day. Half of the online users want to catch up with events they have missed. And another 40 percent want to replay something the first saw on TV.

“The Internet hardly cannibalizes; it actually fuels interest,” said Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s president of research.

“We know without question people want to see the best viewing experience,” he said. “If you watched the Olympics in high definition on a big screen, you are not going to watch it online. So that is why there isn’t going to be a cannibalization.”

That survey finds that 90 percent of people who follow the Olympics watched it only on television. The other 10 percent also used the Internet, mobile phones or video-on-demand services from cable.

For Internet television, the Beijing Olympics represent a milestone, but there is no cannibalization.

The lesson of Beijing so far is that “the more things changed, the more they remain the same.” Even as people adopt new media like the Internet, they keep using older ones as well, he said.

In other words, he said, “the big 800-pound gorilla will remain network television.”