London 2012: BBC operation crucial to success of the Olympics | Owen Gibson

Around 2,500 of the 3,000 hours of London 2012 action will be broadcast. Photograph: Jens Schlueter/AFP/Getty Images

The BBC's launch of its London 2012 coverage ? Minority Report-style trailers, expansive cast and all ? brought home the vast scale of its operation in the capital this summer. And just how crucial it will be to London 2012 organisers.

For all the, largely justified, noise over ticketing it should be remembered that at the end of the process there will be 6.6m tickets sold. Assuming that some people will go to several events, that leaves a potential audience of upwards of 55m watching the Olympics through the prism of their television.

Or, if Boris Johnson and organisers have their way, on huge screens around the country where Olympic fever will course through the veins of all those present. Johnson, full of zeal following his election victory, this week announced Tom Jones as the first act who would appear at free concerts that will punctuate the action in Hyde Park and Victoria Park. Meanwhile, 22 sites throughout the country will also show the action on big screens.

But it is in their living rooms that most people will experience the highs and lows of the Games, and the BBC launch also brought home the extent to which everything and nothing has changed about the way it covers major sporting events.

Those watching on BBC1 will notice little difference ? a few technological advances aside ? from coverage of Olympics past. The formula of the big moments brought to you live and interspersed with interviews, unthreatening sofa-based banter and round-ups of the action of the day is tried and tested.

More unfamiliar territory are the 24 extra channels that will be available via cable and satellite and also via a nifty looking online dashboard that will allow viewers watching via their computer, tablet or internet-connected TV to effectively devise their own schedules. Around 2,500 hours of the 3,000 hours of sporting action will be broadcast ? with only some tennis matches on outer courts and other peripheral action not being captured.

It remains to be seen how this alters viewing patterns ? there is the danger of overload and that viewers will become frozen in the face of so much choice. Will it hamper the BBC's efforts to gather the nation in front of the screen for the biggest moments?

In the US, the revolution is potentially bigger still. There, viewers are used to their entire Olympic viewing experience being time shifted until prime time. NBC would effectively pretend an event hadn't happened until it had been re-shown "as live" in prime time ? often in heavily packaged, editorialised form. This time around, US viewers will also have the opportunity of watching every sport live via YouTube, potentially changing for ever the way they watch the Games.

The tone of the BBC's coverage will also be interesting. It must strike the usual balance between unashamedly banging the drum for Team GB and giving plentiful coverage to all the wider stories of the Games, but with the stakes higher given that it's at home.

It will also have to give far more air time to the news stories around the Games than it usually would. And it will have to strike the right balance between reverence and informality, during a summer when the nation will overdose on pageantry.

During the BBC News Channel's coverage of the torch lighting in ancient Olympia last week, there was perhaps too much portentous commentary and a tendency towards too much reverence. Sydney's Games, most often cited by organisers as the one they look to for inspiration in terms of atmosphere, famously had the irreverent commentary of The Dream With Roy and HG to puncture the occasional pomposity of the Games and poke fun at it without diminishing from the sporting achievements. For all the excellence of the BBC's lineup unveiled this week ? and the undoubted comedic value of TwentyTwelve ? it is hard to see where their equivalent is at the moment.

Sense of unease on BOA evening

The British Olympic Association's Our Greatest Team Rises event at the Royal Albert Hall on Friday was an enjoyable enough evening ? but also something of a curate's egg. It is unlikely that some of those members of the public who paid ?95 to sit in the upper tier of the grand old venue and look down on VIPs and sponsors below eating their dinner and shelling out large sums in an auction for tickets found it value for money. Although no doubt they enjoyed the Duke of Cambridge's brief speech and Gary Barlow's three-song turn.

It seemed something of an uneasy marriage between a black-tie fundraising ball and a public rabble-rousing event. The latter element would surely have been better left until closer to the Games, when more of the team had been named and public enthusiasm had bubbled closer to the surface.

It will be interesting to see how much the event raised. Along with the ?2m the BOA is hoping to raise from selling medals of famous Olympians on BP forecourts and the revenue from the 1m scarves it hopes to shift through Next, the income is vital to ensure that it doesn't use up its ?2m surplus in meeting the ?13m cost of sending a team to the Games. Also vital to avoiding that fate is the ?2m top-up from the National Lottery that seems increasingly certain to be funnelled to the organisation through UK Sport.

The Who do you mean?

Which story has been the most damaging to the reputation of Olympic organisers in recent months? Not missiles atop blocks of flats, or technical difficulties with the frustrating ticketing website, nor the long running Olympic stadium legacy saga. No, the most humiliating is a diary item that has gained a life of its own ? that organisers approached the late Keith Moon to appear at the opening ceremony. The embarrassing approach to The Who's hell-raising drummer, who died in 1978, has been reported around the world and confirmed not only by the band's management but by lead singer Roger Daltrey.

In a perhaps belated attempt at damage limitation, ceremonies chief Stephen Daldry has told the Guardian that the organisers had themselves been cruelly hoaxed. "It was nothing to do with us. It was a bizarre circumstance. It was a rogue person who started sending emails out to all sorts of strange people," claimed the Billy Elliot director, who is in charge of all four Olympic ceremonies and currently overseeing rehearsals in Dagenham.

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