But going forward, the Olympic TV game plan needs change. At least dramatic tweaking.

The idea: Each day pick a few minutes of prime action — the kind of action that now automatically is being held for prime time — and instead air them live on TV and online.

STREAK OVER: Olympics top 'American Idol' in ratings
NBC could announce in advance the snippets of big action — presented, say, in 15-minute time blocks — it will carry live. Tell viewers the exact times. Hype it like crazy. Charge advertisers extra to sponsor these new trademark live look-ins.

They could become appointment TV. Offices could plan 15-minute breaks around them. And viewers might stick around for hours of the normal coverage that follows.

That, of course, is naive according the canon of U.S. Olympic TV, which states: Prime time is when most people sit in front of their TVs, so it's where the big viewership (and ad money) is tied up and thus must get all the best action.

The canon, continues: Any live daytime coverage of big action — such as Lindsey Vonn's gold medal downhill run Wednesday afternoon — would diminish what NBC has really paid for, which is the right to show you Olympic action first — no matter when it happened in real life. Once NBC airs footage, it can air on a limited basis on news shows. If NBC had aired Vonn's run live, it likely would have shown up everywhere before it could air on NBC's Wednesday prime time.

But so what? Brief live daytime look-ins would create more Olympic buzz. Viewers, having been whetted by Vonn's run live, might have been more interested in NBC's prime-time coverage, where they could see the rest of the story with full event coverage, interviews and medal presentations.

Wednesday, NBC got a harmonic convergence — six U.S. medals, including golds from stars Vonn, Shaun White and Shani Davis— to become the first show ever to beat Fox's American Idol. But NBC's Vancouver prime-time average — 14.9% of U.S. households — is up 19% from its 2006 Torino Games. But it is also down 24% from its 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games and down 9% from CBS' 1998 Nagano Winter Games, which posed time-zone challenges.

With Olympic TV, it's time to bend a little in going live.