YouTube will offer coverage of select Olympic events under a deal it has struck with the International Olympic Committee.

As part of the deal, the video-sharing site, which is owned by Google, will stream about three hours of recorded content per day on a dedicated Olympic channel.

The footage - which will include highlight reels and wrap-ups but not live events - will be streamed in 77 territories which do not have Olympic media partners - among them India, South Korea, Mongolia, Rwanda and Iraq.

Internet users in markets where the IOC has sold the video-on-demand rights to the Olympics on an exclusive basis - such as the UK and US - will be blocked from viewing the footage on YouTube.

"For the first time in Olympic history we will have complete global online coverage," Timo Lumme, director of television and marketing services at the IOC, said. The YouTube channel would provide Olympic coverage for the "young generations of sports fans" who went online for their entertainment needs, he said.

The YouTube tie-up - which is expected to result in an additional 200 million people being able to watch events - is part of the IOC's strategy to expand the audience of the Games while respecting media partners who pay millions of dollars for the broadcast rights.

In the UK, the BBC has the exclusive right to distribute on-demand Olympic content via its website. Six TV channels showing live events will be streamed on the BBC site, and at the end of the day 20 hours of coverage will be selected to be uploaded to the iPlayer - the replay service - where it will be available for a week, a BBC spokeswoman said.

On-demand rights in the US are held by NBC.

YouTube will be able to sell advertising around its Olympics channel - but only to Olympic sponsors. Patrick Walker, director of partnerships for Europe, Middle East and Africa at YouTube, said that because of the exclusion of certain, key territories such as the US, the financial benefit would be limited.

"This is really more about the accessibility," Mr Walker told The Wall Street Journal.

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