North Jefferson News, Gardendale, AL

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August 3, 2012

#NBCfail: Netowrk won’t get medals for Olympic coverage

By Robert Carter North Jefferson News

COMMENTARY — It’s a quadrennial tradition, almost as much as some obscure athlete from Whocarezistan in an obscure sport who fails a drug test: complaining about the network television coverage of the Olympic Games.

But that criticism seems to be more pronounced this year for NBC, which is keeping its longstanding policy of delaying big events — that is to say, anything involving swimmer Michael Phelps or the U.S. women’s gymnastics team — on broadcast channels until their big prime time show each night.

Back in the days before the Internet, streaming video, Twitter and Facebook, no one really quibbled that much. Today, that idea seems to be antiquated, especially considering that NBC itself is showing all events live on its website via streaming video.

In other words, those who wanted to see Ryan Lochte win gold and Phelps finish fourth in their head-to-head matchup live last Saturday could have done so. They only had to have a computer, tablet or smartphone capable of handling streaming video, and be a customer of a cable company that carries the NBC family of networks.

There’s just one problem. It seems that NBC is having a hard time keeping the video streaming on a consistent basis. That is not terribly surprising, as feeding video over the Internet is still fairly new technology, and not all the bugs are worked out yet — especially when it seems that half the country is trying to watch one particular program.

But the main point is that there is one huge reason that the network holds the big events for its evening programming: money.

It’s all about the dollars, or the euros, or the pounds Sterling.

As fragmented as our television viewing habits have become over the past few years, the fact remains that most people still watch the big networks in the evening. And where the viewers are, the advertising follows.

In addition, putting that top events in prime time benefits the local NBC stations. Their local commercial spots during Olympic coverage command top dollar, which is why NBC-13 is promoting the Games to the hilt during their local newscasts — almost to a fault. I’m beginning to think that the Vulcan statue could blow up tomorrow, and the Olympics would still lead off the 6 p.m. newscast on 13.

The International Olympic Committee can go on and on about how it’s all for athletes, blah, blah, blah, but they love the money as much as any company ever did, no matter what nation’s currency it is in. Ever since Peter Uberroth showed the IOC how to make the Games earn buckets of money by running the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the games are run like a business — one that makes a nice chunk of change. And most of that comes from television rights sales, with more than half of the worldwide total coming from NBC alone: $1.18 billion.

So it doesn’t matter to NBC, the IOC or anyone else running the show what viewers think, unless those viewers start to leave in disgust. The vast majority of headline events will be held until prime time, even if a lot of people saw them live that morning online or on one of the cable channels like MSNBC (hey, they might get better ratings than Fox News for once).

Because, frankly, the athletes aren’t the only ones going for the gold.

So are the broadcasters.

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