PASADENA, Calif. — NBC will televise 416 hours of the Olympics from Turin, Italy, starting Feb. 10, the most ever for the Winter Games and an increase of 41 hours from what the network carried four years ago.

Spread across the network and three of its cable channels — USA, MSNBC and CNBC — the NBC coverage will include 200 hours of live telecasts over 17 days, with many of the top events airing in high definition and 5.1 surround sound. For the 2002 Olympics, NBC offered just 140 hours of live telecasts, even though they were held in Salt Lake City.

The live part of the NBC schedule comes with an asterisk for the West Coast because all of the network's prime-time shows and its late-night coverage will be on a three-hour tape delay in the Pacific time zone. The NBC daytime shows and the cable telecasts will be shown in real time locally.

In announcing the schedule on Tuesday, Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, and the executive producer of NBC's Olympic coverage, said, "Fortunately our company has continued to grow and create new platforms in which we can bring the Olympics to the viewer, so we can tell as many of these stories as possible."

Among the notable aspects of the NBC coverage:

Four years ago, NBC showed none of the Salt Lake Games in high definition, which was then a developing technology. Two years later the network provided some HD coverage of the Summer Games in Athens, but it was on a separate feed from NBC's regular telecasts, with second-string announcers.

In February, many of the events carried on the network itself — including figure skating, hockey, long- and short-track speed skating, ski jumping, freestyle aerials and moguls, and the opening and closing ceremonies — will be available in HD.

- NBC has signed venerable skating analyst Dick Button, a fixture of Winter Games TV when the Olympics were carried on ABC, to join Tom Hammond, Scott Hamilton, Sandra Bezic and Andrea Joyce on skating. Button will also be one of the co-hosts of "Olympic Ice," a daily behind-the-scenes look at the skating competition that will air on USA.

- All 54 games of men's and women's hockey will air live, most on USA but with the championship contests on NBC. All of the games involving the U.S. teams, as well as the gold-medal games, will be shown commercial-free.

- The Spanish-language channel Telemundo will televise regular updates and a late-night Olympic highlight show from Turin.