NEW YORK -- When Beijing was announced as the winning bidder for the 2008 Olympic games on Friday, free trade and human rights weren't the only topics of debate. That's because it's never too early to start thinking about that half-day jump the Olympians will have on the viewers in North America.

Coming off the 2000 Olympics with the 15-hour time difference from Sydney to New York, North America might not find Beijing's 12-hour time difference much better.

Wilson Cheung, who grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in New York, is an avid fan of the Olympics, but admits "it would be much easier if it was in Toronto because of the time zone." Still, he said he will likely watch more Olympic coverage in 2008 because of his Chinese heritage.

Seven years from now, Cheung obviously doesn't know if he'll be watching tape-delayed coverage in prime time or be forced to watch it live during the wee hours of the morning. That decision lies with NBC, which has not yet decided whether to tape-delay its coverage of the 2004 Summer Games in Athens or the 2006 Winter Games in Italy. NBC recently announced it would use a combination of live and taped coverage of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City in February. It will tape-delay coverage only on the West Coast.

"When we began our relationship with the Olympics in 1995, we realized that we had nothing to do with the selection process," said Kevin Sullivan, NBC Sports' vice president of communications. "Those decisions were something that we'd have to deal with down the road."

The 2000 Sydney Olympics, which NBC taped for primetime, drew national ratings of 13.8 with a 24 share. The worst ratings for a Olympics Games in 32 years, however, comes with the disclaimer that the Summer Games were played out of season in September.

While the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offered live coverage of the 2000 Olympics, NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol defended his network's decision to televise the Games in primetime. Given what NBC paid in rights fees, it wanted to assure that it had the largest audiences possible.

CBC paid $160 million for the rights to the five Olympiads from 2000 through 2008. NBC paid $705 million alone for the Sydney Summer Games.

NBC averaged almost 59 million viewers throughout the 17-day event, roughly 21 percent of the United States population. CBC, which showed live coverage from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m., averaged 201,000 viewers -- less than 1 percent of Canada's population.

NBC sold $900 million in gross advertising for the 2000 Olympics and, despite being forced to provide make-goods to advertisers because of disappointing ratings, the network said it earned "tens of millions."

"There's a lot that's going to happen over the next couple years," said David Carter, principal of The Sports Business Group, a sports consultancy firm. "But whether it's live or taped will be the decision of the sponsors and the advertisers. In a time where the corporate dollars in sports are so tight, they'll have more clout that usual."

Live coverage isn't out of the question. If a World Cup soccer tournament can transcend time differences, why can't the Olympics? The networks likely will continue to televise its World Cup coverage live, despite that the time difference contributed to a ratings decline in 1998, when the games played in France dictated a coverage start in the morning on the East Coast. The 2002 World Cup ratings might be worse with the matches in South Korea and Japan.

But does the average fan really care where the Olympic are being played?

"For a person who doesn't travel, the Olympics could be taking place on a soundstage in Philadelphia and many people probably wouldn't mind," said Rick Burton, director of University of Oregon's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. "At some point all the stadiums in all the cities look the same and all the basketball courts have the same dimensions."

"With the Olympics going to China, there's a certain degree of mystery to it all," Burton said. "There's the Great Wall and The Forbidden City and the skyline of Shanghai. But there's always the cultural intrigue wherever it is. If it went to Paris, you'd see the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. In Sydney, there was the opera house and the kangaroos.

"Your average guy from Kankakee couldn't care."

Darren Rovell, who covers sports business for ESPN.com, can be reached at Darren.Rovell@ESPN.com.