NBC Olympic Coverage: is the Internet the Enemy?
A year and a half ago I wrote that I expected the Beijing Olympics would be "the last pre-Internet Olympics," but I was wrong. The Vancouver Olympics has established that NBC has no interest in maximizing viewer interest in the games, or in minimizing the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars it says it will suffer from covering the event.
Wed, February 17, 2010
Network World — A year and a half ago I wrote that I expected the Beijing Olympics would be "the last pre-Internet Olympics," but I was wrong. The Vancouver Olympics has established that NBC has no interest in maximizing viewer interest in the games, or in minimizing the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars it says it will suffer from covering the event.
I will not say much about NBC's decision to broadcast most of the more important events in the Vancouver Olympics during prime time via tape delay. This is bad enough on the East Coast of the United States where the time difference means that at least some things, such as the opening ceremony, are broadcast live. But it's ridiculous on the West Coast where viewers have to wait three hours to see coverage of events taking place just up the coast. Rather, many commentators have already discussed this silliness at length and often with more color than I can use in this publication.
Slideshow: Vancouver 2010: An Exclusive Tour of the Technology Operations Center
Slideshow: Six High-Tech Ways to Enjoy the 2010 Olympics
Instead I want to talk about NBC's technical time warp. As far as one can tell, NBC is caught in the mid 1980s when it comes to the Internet.
In that pre-Web age it was rare, but not unheard of, for the Internet to be used to be bring information in real time to people around the world.
It is now a very long time, in Internet years at least, since the mid-1980s but one could hardly tell when looking at the NBC Olympics Web site. If you go to the video page and ask to view the "full live streaming schedule" you get a quite pathetic and limited list of events. When I looked on Feb. 14, curling and hockey were the only sports listed. Wikipedia says that there are 14 sports and more than 80 events during the winter Olympic games.
Most of these events will not be shown on TV in the United States. The video is available since almost all of the events are being shown on TV or streamed over the Internet in other countries. It would not cost NBC all that much to stream the events it will not be covering on its shows. Such coverage, particularly of training and preliminary events, would increase interest in the finals, at least some of which NBC will be carrying. But that would make too much sense.
