The exhaustive coverage of the Summer Olympics from Beijing next month — 3,600 hours on television and online — presents NBC Universal with a problem: how to give advertisers a portrait of viewership on seven networks, the Internet (both computers and cellphones) and video-on-demand downloads.

"The Olympics is a singular event because of its scale and because of the number of people who will consume it over 17 days, so it will magnify the use of every platform," said Alan Wurtzel, president of research for NBC Universal, which is owned by General Electric and Vivendi. "We had to figure out how to measure ourselves across all platforms."

Audience measurement has often remained piecemeal and diffuse. NBC's solution is called the total audience measurement index, or TAMI, which is an amalgam of existing yardsticks from sources like Nielsen Media Research and the lesser-known Omniture and Rentrak.

"This is not to make Nielsen numbers bigger but to understand a new media world," Mr. Wurtzel said. "I'll be happy when TAMI goes out of business because it'll mean one company has found a way to measure all this stuff."

The Olympics will be on NBC, Telemundo, USA, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and Oxygen, with streaming video, video-on-demand, and statistical, biographical and other information available at nbcolympics.com.

TAMI will provide standard raw data about viewers, unique online users and time spent on sections of nbcolympics.com. Mr. Wurtzel plans to provide daily glimpses of Internet demographics, consumer preferences for video on computers and mobile devices, and how the Internet complements TV viewing. The results, he said, may help advertising efforts for the 2010 and 2012 Olympics.

"I have no idea how people will use the Internet on the Olympics," Mr. Wurtzel said. "It's never been used to the scale we have now."

In the fall, NBC will use TAMI to assess the cross-platform appeal of nearly all of its prime-time programs. Last year, it tested the index on episodes of its science-fiction series "Heroes."

Joe Goode, senior vice president for global marketing at Bank of America, which will advertise on TV and online during the Beijing Games, said, "The information from NBC is broad in scope and is likely to provide us with rich data to complement our own brand measurement efforts."

NBC is using TAMI with several other research studies, one of them to be conducted by Integrated Media Measurement of San Mateo, Calif. The Olympic media behavior of 40 people will be tracked with specially equipped cellphones that can pick up the audio cues from what is being viewed on NBC's networks and its Web site.

"We want to see how people use the Olympics," Mr. Wurtzel said.