Before the Beijing Olympics began, the worry was that NBC’s online coverage of the Games via live web feed would cannibalize the broadcast audience.

That's not happening.  If anything, the opposite is true.

The feeds appear to be helping the network reach a broader audience, with the effect of boosting viewership of the network's TV coverage and driving ratings well ahead of the past two Olympics.

That’s according to new data released yesterday by NBC, based on what it's dubbed TAMi, a tool that measures the total exposure to the Olympics across multiple platforms. The data shows that while NBC's mobile and online audience is growing, so too is its TV audience.

Through the first four days of the Games, traffic to NBC’s web and mobile sites has increased every day. Its total reach across television and digital platforms, which also include video on demand, has exceeded 97 million for three days running, including 113 million on Sunday, the day of the women’s gymnastics preliminaries.

In that same time, NBC posted its best-ever Summer Olympics opening Sunday audience, its highest-rated non-U.S. opening ceremonies, and the best Monday performance for any network in four years.

“In Athens, there was concern that too much coverage might dilute the market. But the more coverage we put out, it seemed to fuel buzz and interest and drive Olympic fans to the primetime TV screen,” said NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel in a conference call with reporters yesterday.

“We see digital doing the same thing, with greater intensity and volume.”

Television still makes up more than 92 percent of viewership each day, but the internet’s share is starting to grow. On day one, for example, some 4.2 million unique users visited NBCOlympics.com, compared to 70.1 million who watched a portion of the opening ceremonies on TV.

The web made up 5.7 percent of the total audience of 74.6 million that day, with mobile streams making up another 0.3 percent, at 210,333, and VOD contributing 36,446.

By Monday, the number of mobile streams had more than doubled, hitting 476,062, or 0.5 percent of the 103 million total Olympic audience. The web had also risen, to 7.8 million unique users, or 7.6 percent of the day’s total audience.

Meanwhile, the TV audience was 94.8 million, accounting for 92 percent of the total audience.

“The multi-platform distribution across every platform, wherever you are, is fueling interest in [the Games] and driving people to share in the Olympics in primetime as they have done since the beginning of time,” Zenkel said.

Interestingly, the increase in video consumption isn’t just limited to the U.S. Canada’s CBCSports.ca streaming services have reported receiving 250,000 hits per day, and page views are up to 2 million per day, double what the site saw per week last summer.

Of course the big question for NBC, which is offering 25 live streaming sports and some 2,200 hours total of video, is how to monetize this in the future, now that it has reassured advertisers that its TV audience won’t be hurt by online.

The network sold online advertising as part of its Olympic packages this year, but more targeted and more specialized advertising opportunities seem likely the next few years, as the percent of the total audience coming from the web continues to grow.