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COPENHAGEN – The Olympic movement needs to learn from the likes of YouTube or risk losing young viewers for life, IOC members were told Monday.

However, the way audiences consumed the Olympics through digital media offered a glimpse of the future, he said.

Users of the NBCOlympics.com Web site watched 70 million video streams compared to 9.1 million for the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics.

And online viewers were more committed, spending twice as much time watching the Beijing events than traditional television audiences.

Sorrell said sports leaders would be forced to sell their broadcast rights for less if they did not understand the changing market and lost audiences.

“We must ensure the iPod, iPhone generation is tuning in, not tuning out,” he said.

Communications guru Martin Sorrell advised global sports leaders to release their grip on exclusive broadcast rights and hand them over to a new generation of technology-savvy fans.

“If they are going online, you go online,” Sorrell said in a keynote speech on digital media at the International Olympic Committee’s Congress. “You have to let them play — with your content, your assets — in their own way.”

Sorrell, chief executive of London-based agency WPP Group, the world’s largest advertising company by revenue, said sports federations had to learn from how the entertainment industry engaged with viewers.

He urged sports to let passionate fans buy access to archive footage, and held up Major League Baseball as an example of how to make money online.

“They are now driving nearly $200 million directly from subscription revenues to their Web site,” he said.

IOC President Jacques Rogge described Sorrell, a Harvard-educated Englishman, as the world’s most influential man in advertising and communications.

“He has definitely opened up new ways for us,” Rogge said.

Sorrell said 1.4 billion people had Internet access and 4 billion used mobile phones.

People with mobile wireless devices were “no longer satisfied” with just consuming content created by television networks. They wanted to make their own images and communicate through social networking sites, he said.

“The digital revolution has already changed the media landscape and the way in which sport is consumed will never be the same again,” Sorrell said.

“Give content to youth in formats they want — short and fast, customizable and easy to share. Don’t deny it or file it in the ‘too difficult’ folder.”

Sorrell said sports must learn from franchises such as Pop Idol (American Idol), in which viewers vote for their favorite performers.

“Consider the excitement generated by the most popular TV shows, pop stars and new films,” he said.

“See how they use digital media at the core of their communications and consider which learnings you could apply to your own sport.”

Sorrell assured the IOC it had a strong brand, and the 2008 Beijing Games was the most watched television event in history. A total of 593 million people watched the opening ceremony live.

He guessed he could sell around 1,000 copies of the book in electronic form. It costs 14.95 euros ($22.26) in hard cover and 2.99 euros in digital format.

A children’s picture book about a giraffe on safari in South Africa is set to go digital next month, betting that the next generation will embrace electronic media from the word go.

“All in all a real book is much more beautiful when a child is holding it in his hands, but ebooks as a medium have a future as well,” said Felix Busse, whose Vielflieger Verlag bills itself as the world’s smallest publisher.

“Little Giraffe Guckindieluft on Safari” is the second in a series of books about the giraffe penned by Busse and illustrated by Cuban painter Victor Moreno.

It includes text in English, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese to appeal to a world audience.

The book is available as a hard-cover edition and should also appear as an ebook on Apple around the middle of next month for iPhone and iPod Touch downloads, Busse told Reuters at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

In this photo relesed by General Electric, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt unveils GE Healthcare’s new Vscan, a pocket-sized ultrasound device, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009. (AP Photo/General Electric)

The future of ultrasound technology, as interpreted by General Electric Co., looks a bit like a flip phone crossed with an iPod.

GE CEO Jeff Immelt unveiled a handheld ultrasound machine at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Tuesday called the Vscan, saying it could become the “stethoscope of the 21st century.”

The device folds open clamshell-style to reveal a small screen on the top half and a circular button pad on the bottom. A small attached wand can be used to generate a noninvasive scan of a patient’s organs or of a fetus.

The Vscan is aimed in part at primary care doctors, who could use it instead of sending patients to get an ultrasound at a specialist’s office. It could also be used by doctors in remote regions without access to hospital equipment.

Immelt said that the device, which will be available sometime next year, will be “very digitally capable” but that it will not have Wi-Fi access to wirelessly transmit ultrasound images.

The cost of the device is unknown.

During the summit, Immelt declined to elaborate on the possibility that Fairfield, Conn.-based GE will sell a stake in its NBC Universal entertainment division to cable TV operator Comcast Corp. or any other company. He said that GE is “comfortable” with the division.