NBC Universal agreed on Wednesday to pay $7.75 billion for the exclusive broadcast rights to the six Olympic Games from 2022 to 2032, highlighting with that staggering sum the supreme value that media companies are placing on live event programming in a market disrupted by modern viewing habits.

As more viewers consume media on their own schedules, often without commercials, broadcasters regard live events as the only content that compels most viewers to watch in real time, as one vast audience, without filtering out advertisers. The Olympics have long been NBC’s most prized possession, but ESPN has used its billions of dollars in annual subscriber fees to build a portfolio of enormous deals for live sports, and Fox, CBS and NBC have long-term agreements with the National Football League.

The agreement between NBC Universal and the International Olympic Committee also captures just how technologically frenetic the media landscape is. Once, such deals had to contemplate only television, but smartphones and tablets have become an increasingly large segment of the viewing audience, and no one can guess how people will watch sports in 2032. The new Olympic contract acknowledges this, stipulating that NBC will have the exclusive rights to broadcast the Games on whatever technology emerges between now and then.

As the dominant force in Olympic television in the United States since 1992, NBC has shifted from the old-line model that utilized only broadcast television to one that added cable channels to one that, at last February’s Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, embraced live video streaming of all events to computers, smartphones and tablets. NBC, which has swooped to make billion-dollar Olympic rights acquisitions before, is now looking at extending its dominion further than ever. By 2032, nearly all its top executives will have retired.