Posted on 08/16/2012 5:04:31 AM PDT by C19fan
Though it came under fire at times over its use of tape delays during the London Olympics, NBC doesn’t appear to have any regrets. In fact, the network wishes it did it more. Days after the conclusion of the most-watched television event in U.S. history, NBC expects to make a profit on the 2012 Olympics, which made heroes out of Michael Phelps, Gabby Douglas and Missy Franklin, among other athletes. Network officials said they got a ratings boost by showing some of those events during prime time, sometimes hours after they happened.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Fortunately for 2016, the events are in Brazil, so we’ll get things closer to real time. The 2020 Olympics will need a sea change in approach to media coverage, or there will be a lot of unhappy American viewers. By then, I suspect media is going to look a lot different anyway. NBC and the rest will probably have multiple streaming options by then vs traditional broadcast/cable networks. The speed of change in media is going to be great between now and then.
Mexican TV did a better job of covering interesting events.
Bit Torrent
Pirate video streams.
I forgot that NBC even existed.
And mostly boring. Every time I turned in NBC was either showing basketball, boxing, or volleyball. I can watch that and the NBA thugs anytime.
Guess it was too hard or too expensive to take their cameras outside of the dome. Why not more coverage of the sports one only sees every 4 years: kayaking, archery, skeet shooting, dressage, canoeing, decathlon, badminton, table tennis, etc.?
The Winter Olympics are more exciting and coverage is usually a lot better.
Would have been interesting to compare the BBC coverage of their Olympics.
NBC will tape-delay very little coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympics because Rio de Janeiro is only one hour ahead of Eastern time.
Maybe so, but all but about one hour of my Olympics watching was online and live. Watched about one hour of NBC coverage of a competition I missed seeing live.
I watched the Mexico/Brazil soccer finals on Univision
Amen! I think I watched about 15 minutes of it all told. Worst coverage ever. Hopefully someone who is more adept at responding to what the public wants will broadcast the Winter Olympics.
NBC left many events uncovered; they thought we were in love with Bob Costas; he’s a friggin TV prompter reader; we have enough of that already!
They will still tape delay it. Events generally take place during the day and NBC wants to show the big stuff in prime time so it will be tape delayed. About the best are when the Olympics are in eastern Asia or Australia where morning events show up live in prime time in the US.
NBC hates those because they don't have hours to research the winners and produce their background stories on them for Bob Costas to yap about. If it is live, they don't know who will win and might waste their time producing a heart rending story about how the athlete's sister was eaten by a bear for someone who come in last in the first round and is never seen again.
I can understand NBC's desire to tape everything and then show it later. They can then stick in commercials where there aren't delays in the event. They can skip when the blocks aren't set properly on a sprint and everyone is milling around for ten minutes. They can show two events that are happening at the same time which they can't if they are live. But some time in the future every single event will be available without inane commentary and the viewer will be able to watch handball all day every day if he wants.
Every sport was available live on internet feeds, and NBC's cable networks carried a lot of these sports both live and tape-delayed.
The prime time broadcast was tailored for the prime-time audience, not the sports junkies who knew how to find and use the live feeds. I saw (well, kind of... it was over 3G) the women's gymnastics team finals live, half a day before it aired on NBC primetime, using NBC's own iPhone app.
Please...no more diving!
Yes, I'm an Olympic junkie and I watched most on TV because my lousy 1 Mbps DSL just isn't able to handle a live feed at a decent resolution. Maybe if they gave a gold medal in "buffering" I would get it.
Thanks for your reply, but some of us work and can’t get the live feeds during the day. Still don’t see why NBC just chose to show boring basketball, volleyball, and boxing at night primarily.
Did you watch the primetime broadcasts? I don’t recall seeing any boxing or basketball (outside of highlights), though they did show a lot of volleyball. The primetime broadcasts were mostly gymnastics, swimming, diving, track & field, and volleyball (beach, primarily), because NBC determined those were the highest-demand sports for the target demographics.
If you wanted the other stuff, you could have gone with videotape/DVR on the daytime broadcasts.
The other channels may have shown a lot of stuff live, but they never showed track and field.
Do you work for NBC ? lol
I did a good bit of DVRing. In fact saved about 25GB of Olympic shows. I still maintain that the lesser sports were not adequately covered. Maybe I just missed the coverage or could have checked the schedules better, but my DVR footage is still mostly volleyball, boxing, water polo, wrestling, lot of soccer, traditional stuff - and not that much of what I would call the exotic sports you only get to see every 4 years.
I really enjoyed the rafting, canoeing, shooting (bow and gun), dressage, decathlon, and biking - which I feel NBC did not cover adequately. Usually just the highlights were presented in those sports. I know, you can’t please everybody. NBC just didn’t fill my bill.
London put on a good Olympics. Still curious how the BBC presented it.
LOL, no. I certainly wish the Olympics were covered by a competent organization. That said, they do use their cable channels to pretty good effect during the games. I saw judo, tae kwon do, badminton, table tennis, fencing, equestrian, cycling, kayak, etc., while flipping between channels. And again, all of it was available online, mostly in "raw" feed format, with no commentators at all.
But as far as primetime goes, that's where they're going for the big ad bucks, and they choose to show what they think will draw the most eyeballs from the target audiences. As a male outside of the 18-35 demographic, I don't think that's me. ;) We can argue whether or not they are making the right choices, but they're more interested in their bottom line than they are about showcasing sport.
LOL! An excellent summation of NBC's real agenda. :)
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