With the Olympics being broadcast by NBC there is interesting experiment going on. While NBC would love for you to be surprised when an event is shown hours after it happened and in a shortened format, that is not the real world of 2010. There are quite a few great articles about how NBC is not making their audience very happy. Here is a good one from NPR. And another from CNET. Both of these are very good articles speaking to the unhappiness of the NBC audience.
Much of the anger is based on the strategy of doing “tape delays” to better promote their content — as the sole US provider of Olympic content — for better prime time ratings. I think that this is yet another example of how the old media do not “get it”. Especially with the Internet available on many different devices how can a fan not know the results of an event that they are interested in? How does that serve the athletes that have trained so very hard for their events? How does that help grow interest in sports that might only come to the attention of viewers once every 4 years, but might have a fan base that could grow?
It is interesting that some of the sponsors of NBC’s coverage of the games promote the ability to view the events anywhere anytime. One problem with that is NBC is unwilling to provide those feeds! So on one hand you have the local stations telling their viewers that they want to interact with them about what is going on in the games in real time via twitter and facebook. On the other hand you have the corporate “brains” for instance showing the women’s downhill in a fragmented format the night of the event — hours after the results of the event are known. Fans will know that the skiers go off in bib number order. Starting the “event” with bib number 4 is not showing the event. Skipping to bib 15 next, really! I was listening on a cool new feature on google. I did a search for women’s downhill on google and they had a streaming portion of the results page. They were pulling tweets real time into the frame and so I was hearing about the crashes and how hard the course was in virtual real time. I knew that there were 2 US women on the podium as it happened. NBC did show some of the crashes later and then again and again and again.
Now the downhill got me all fired up, as I am a skier and love the sport. I started looking at the tweet tag #nbcfail. Very interesting that many people were also feeling my pain at not being able to view the live event. NBC is saying that it is a vocal minority that are unhappy with their coverage. This is very much like the RIAA saying that downloads are hurting their business model. Here is a news flash to you both — you are the dinosaurs and the model has changed. There are so many different ways to view content that you cannot control them. Just talk to the guys over in Iran.
Now my guess is that the “fans” of a sport will actually watch the whole event of their sport (hockey fans Canada vs. US). That will include the commercials — note to advertisers. When only the highlights of USA+ (see the NPR story above for the description) is shown those same fans will only tune in for a very short time to view their sport and then go watch other things — avoiding all commercials in the process. My thoughts are that NBC will not listen to people that are unhappy. I wonder if you contact some of the advertisers and let them know that you will NOT buy their products if they continue to support a company that does not support the fans, athletes or their families. Might that change the way that NBC shows the games?
I would imagine that by the time the next games come around there will be individuals streaming events from their mobile devices to “friends”. They in fact are probably doing that now. The genie is out of the bottle and using the old school methods to try to keep the suspense is outdated and should be shown in the bright lights as a shining example of how NOT to show a sporting event. Just imagine the outrage if a NASCAR or Superbowl was show tape delayed by 8 hours!
The Horror – The Horror.