Olympics Australian broadcast partner Seven West Media is "slicing and dicing" distribution channels in its presentation of 5000 hours of coverage.

But head of digital content Michael Beach says the challenge is knowing how to make the most of broadcast rights on every screen, from TV to mobile, as well as on the big platforms.

The more than 5000 hours of TV coverage - including 3000 of live events - has called for a team of 450 people in production and transmission centres in Rio, Sydney and Melbourne taking content from 101 separate vision feeds into the network's coordination centre and via 20 dedicated satellite links.

Seven also has a crew of ten putting specialist camera technologies exclusively at the disposal of the Rio Olympic Broadcast Organisation, to contribute to coverage of events including swimming, diving, water polo and synchronised swimming for a global audience.

In Sydney, a huge complex has a bigger team than that in Rio, including three virtual sets for the free-to-air channels and what Beach describes as "an electrician's nightmare" of cabling. A video editing team monitors live feeds, clipping them into individual short-form videos - for distribution including Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook - with the strategy being to run pre-rolls before streams and edited clips.

A focus on maximising website video streams has seen "loads of clips" being pushed to Brightcove accounts for the thewest.com.au and Yahoo!7 websites.

Snappy TV in Perth and Sydney is being used to clip videos straight off the free-to-air broadcast feed.

"And, because we are storytellers, our sharp-eyed video editing team is also producing original videos focusing on key moments and ideas," he says. "Plus, our small team of journalists in Rio have been doing plenty of Facebook Live videos, which readers are loving."

Broadcast rights "aren't cheap", and Beach says in an INMA post that the aim has been to create as many advertising channels as possible. That means not only round-the clock coverage on three free-to-air digital channels - with big advertising partners "wanting a piece of the action" - but taking advantage of the ability to stream dozens of individual feeds from the various sports.

The International Olympic Committee's "vanilla" app has been reskinned into free and premium versions, and group members are all leveraging the rights. In the case of Pacific Magazines, that has even meant collectible pins for each of six?? sports.

"In essence, the strategy is very simple: Use the abundance of great Olympics content at our fingertips to find the largest audience possible," he says. "Then slice and dice the distribution channels to create as many advertising channels as possible.

Early audience numbers saw 4.1 million online streams in the first two days of competition, unusually free for an Olympics, and spanning all mobile and tablet devices.

The 4.1 million streams - 2.8 million of which were on the second day when interest in swimming was strong - compare with the single-day streaming record of 843,000 for the first day of this year's Australian Open tennis tournament. The West Australian newspaper's thewest.com.au website had a record week for videos streams last week, peaking on Tuesday when Kyle Chambers won the 100 metres freestyle.