The Beijing Olympics would be the first broadband Games and a radically new media event, believes Asia Netcom CEO Bill Barney.
"In Beijing you will have 6 million amateur reporters showing up who can take a video and beam it around the world in seconds from the stadium. You couldn't have done it in Athens or Sydney," he said.
But not only would this make Beijing 2008 a "totally different media experience", it would also impact on the advertiser-driven business model of the Olympics.
Since 1984 the modern Olympics has been funded and organised around the ability of networks to deliver billions of viewers to high-spending advertisers.
The arrival of broadband networks and Web 2.0 would change that, Barney predicted.
"It's not what the NBC will do for the Olympic Games, it's what the consumer is going to do - short of saying "Ëœno phones or cameras', which would be completely unenforceable."
"It's going to undermine the entire way in which the Olympics is run," Barney forecast.