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Nielsen Mobile reported today that the expected mobile traffic generated by the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing is forecast to break records of its own and be a “watershed moment” for the mobile media world.

According to their data, about 45% of U.S. mobile video users and 31% of U.K. cell phone viewers will tune in for the Olympic Games on their phones or PDAs.

“In general, the event-driven and around-the-clock nature of the Olympics make the next few weeks a really important testing ground for the state of mobile media,” said Nicholas Covey, director of insights for Nielsen Mobile, in the report.

NBC is leading mobile Olympics coverage with a range of offerings—although, strangely, there’s no mention of this on NBC’s mobile home page or on the NBC Mobile site. Instead, for the lowdown, go to www.nbcolympics.com/mobile on your desktop computer, or text OLYMPICS to 51515 with your cell phone. The actual mobile Web portal, accessible by cell phones, is at mobile.nbcolympics.com. More after the jump.

AT&T Wireless also has NBC Olympics 2Go, a mobile TV channel with live event coverage from NBC, the USA Network, MSNBC and CNBC. And NBC is distributing Olympics content through Helio, Verizon Wireless, Alltel, T-Mobile, and MobiTV.Certain events particularly lend themselves to mobile viewing. “Consumers are especially looking forward to the high-profile, short events such as track and field and gymnastics on their phone,” said Kanishka Agarwal, vice president of mobile media at Nielsen Mobile, in a statement. “Longer team sports, such as soccer and volleyball, are less conducive to mobile viewing, but mobile users will still follow the scores closely on their devices.”

Nothing has generated more buzz around mobile access than this event to date, and hopefully, but with such a large audience tuning in, it should be apparent that these 1st time mobile users will now join the rapidly growing ranks of sophisticated consumers expecting more and more information they can access right from their phones.