NBC thinks that its plans to live stream most of the upcoming 2014 Sochi Olympics will put an end to what has become a predictable chorus of American viewers blasting the Peacock for airing tape-delayed events in an age when people are used to consuming content on demand.

“We think that streaming everything live—mostly in an authenticated world—should satisfy that pure sports fan,” NBC Sports Group Chairman Mark Lazarus told the Hollywood Radio & Television Society at a lunch panel in Beverly Hills Tuesday.

When asked about the use of tape delays during the 2012 London games, which led to a wave of online complaints and backlash against NBC, Lazarus pointed out that a 30 million people still tuned in to primetime Olympics broadcasts when they already knew the results.

“Those are the people who really count,” Lazarus told the panel.

Most of London 2012 was also streamed online, however, and that failed to stop the hashtag #nbcfail from hosting a mushrooming chorus of Peacock critics throughout the game. The panel’s moderator, ESPN personality Sage Steele, didn’t ask Lazarus why he thought streaming would quell the critics in 2014.

He also tried to draw a distinction between the Olympics and your average football or basketball matchup which has to be watched live. Unlike those games, “the Olympics aren’t really sports,” he said.

“They’re nationalism; they’re pop culture,” Lazarus said. “They’re packaged and curated stories that make you care about athletes you may have never heard about. They make you care about someone you don’t know, or may never hear from again. That’s a real skill that NBC has developed over the years.”

Later in the panel, Steele asked Lazarus and the others on the stage—Time Warner Cable President of Sports David Rone, Fox Sports President Eric Shanks, and Mandalay Entertainment Group CEO Peter Guber—about the growth in regional sports networks.

“Regional sports networks are the future in the sense that they are the strongest tie you can have to a viewer,” said Fox Sports’ Shanks. “As part of a larger portfolio including national broadcast and digital properties, they are the tip of the spear.”

Rone said that the benefit of regional sports nets lies in their ability to really go deep and connect with fans by offering non-event programming that gives them an all-access pass to the teams they care about.

“You have the power to do that in the regional sports world in a much deeper way,” Rone said.

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