The Paley Center for Media has partnered with the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) to make some 1,300 hours of television coverage of the Olympics available for viewing at its Los Angeles and New York City branches. Included are broadcasts from the 1960 Olympic Winter Games in Squaw Valley through the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. A full press release can be found here.
The collection — officially titled The U.S. Olympic Archive, presented by Gordon Crawford — consists of original broadcast and cable coverage, with original commentary and in many cases original commercials, rather than edited highlights or individual sporting events. That’s the good news. The bad news is apparently you have to visit one of the Paley Center’s branches in person to even search the collection.
You can see what the collection interface looks like here. While it is understandable that the entire collection cannot be viewed online, it should at the very least be searchable online. Hopefully that’s in the works and or will be possible in the future.
