Posted on 07/30/2021 7:27:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
This is the first time I can remember an Olympic Games with so little media conversation around it. With the exception of the Simone Biles incident, people seem less inclined to pay attention. Advertisers are fretting as well that attention has declined and viewership is down.
One of the natures of a monopoly is there is very little incentive to provide a great product at a low price. It is a reason government-run entities tend to come in overbudget with a worse product than private sector entities. With no competition, there is no reason to innovate, improve or seek efficiencies.
Much of the blame for our national lack of attention should be with NBC. Yes, an Olympics halfway around the world and already a day ahead of us is harder to cover, but NBC has made it even harder. A television network owned by a cable company that has a monopoly on coverage is probably destined to provide cable-company-quality service.
My friends and I have tried watching. But where do we go? The games are spread across multiple channels, and we are cord cutters. To watch, one must get the NBC app, the NBC Sports app and the terrible-to-use-and-navigate Peacock app. I have an Apple TV, and Apple has made it really easy with its TV app interface to see what sports are on. NBC's apps have made it extremely difficult to get into those apps to watch the sports.
Inevitably, I find myself having to quit the app, go back to the Apple TV interface and then jump back in. The NBC Sports app is the worst; I knew its bugs were pronounced before the Olympics, having had to use it to watch the Stanley Cup. ESPN and Disney have a much better product, but then Disney does not have the monopoly on coverage of the Olympics.
NBC has done a disservice to its viewers and the athletes with its schizophrenic approach that takes the worst of a cable company and layers it over what is supposed to be the best of America. When one is actually able to watch a sport, NBC would rather one hear its commentators and see its prepared biography specials than actually watch the sport. In an era of mass employment needs, NBC would be OK axing all parties responsible. They'd surely be able to get jobs elsewhere to screw up something other than the Olympics.
As for the Olympics themselves, I am not sure why everyone feels the need to have an opinion on Simone Biles, but everyone does. My first reaction was that it was terrible for her to abandon her team before the finals. But, upon a review of the data, I had to change my mind.
Based on her scores headed into the finals, had Biles stuck around, she probably would have cost the Americans their silver medal and most likely would have dragged them into no-medal territory. Being a leader requires knowing when to step aside for others. She appears to grasp that.
Unfortunately, in the era of hot takes and with the anti-American pollution of the Team USA women's soccer team, a lot of people immediately denounced Biles as something less than an American. Unlike the women's soccer team, she has never taken a position that might cast shame or blame on the United States.
The politicization of American sports has been a real disappointment. That it has spilled over into the Olympics makes it even worse. That people feel compelled to offer up opinions about it all on social media, often without data or a full picture, just exacerbates all the problems.
On top of it all, the media is desperate to turn our athletes into real-life heroes with hagiographic profiles amplified by NBC's programming decisions. Biles is a phenomenal athlete. Had this happened a decade ago, it probably would have gone without much commentary. Now, everyone feels compelled to weigh in.
Maybe, instead of weighing in on Biles, we should wonder why three athletes have dropped out due to mental health and wonder, after Larry Nasser, what Team USA and the NBC coverage have done.
That is probably true. The problem is the Olympics were billed as essentially "The Simone Biles Show". It's hard to expect viewers to watch a show when the star is not even on. I kinda think Biles should have pulled out before the Olympics. Maybe NBC talked her into sticking around in an attempt to pull in viewers?
The article drifts exceptionally fast from the stated topic into something else. However, the original topic could be interesting for discussion:
Should one broadcaster own all Olympic coverage or is there a better way?
I think they should open it up and sell coverage by type of event. Let the different broadcasters innovate how the event is covered and I think you’ll see some events like team handball and water polo viewed by more people than ever before.
Monopoly - little incentive - great product - low price.
That is precisely what monopolies claim as their reason for existing, their raison d’etre.
Standard Oil of New Jersey. I.G. Farben (the devil’s chemists who were looking for the man who became Hitler in the early 1920s, who took blame for the Kaiser’s loss of WW1 because of being 6 months too late making gasoline from coal, who sought to redeem themselves by starting WW2 as a profit-making enterprise, whose corporate militia was the SS, which rushed to the Skoda Werke chemical industry in Bohemia ahead of the Wehrmacht, put a gun in the owner’s mouth and said “sign away your company” to Farben, whose gasoline plant at Oswiecim, Auschwitz in Poland, only killed Jews as a sideline.)
These monsters have traditionally claimed that they provided a great product at a low price.
It’s up for debate.
How many condoms were issued to each Olympian by the IOC?
Yes, an Olympics halfway around the world and already a day ahead of us is harder to cover, but NBC has made it even harder.
I’ve heard this is one key reason for the ratings slump, that people can hear the results of today’s competitions when watching the Today Show, Good Morning America, etc., and already knowing the outcomes, will be less likely to tune in prime time TV tonight to watch the events they already know the outcomes of.
Woke broke the olympics.
With the ability to stream, the IOC should dig into doing this themselves. They would probably make a shitton more money. There are certain events that I would love to watch that are never ever broadcast, and I would definitely pay to watch them and only them if the price were low. If they price it correctly, they could even get venues like bars to pay appropriately for the content streams based on an honor system, which would even further their income. There is a whole business model\analysis that would need to go into it, but it would remove the expense of the middle man that NBC is and potentially put that income into the IOC’s pocket.
And what is broadcast is 5% sport and 95% commentary and life story about a gay Brit diver and his husband etc. I tuned in last night and after 20 minutes of not showing an event I looked at my wife and said this was stupid, where is the Olympics?
People are sick and tired of in your face wokeness, LGBTWHATEVER and hatred of the flag. Enough already. Do your sport and stand proudly for the flag that paid your way. Outside that, keep your traps shut. Didn’t their mama’s teach them it’s not polite to discuss politics and religion at the table?
How much did people really talk about the Olympics in the past? They may have talked about gymnastics or figure skating or the dream team, and there’d be one other star — Mark Spitz or Michael Phelps or Greg Louganis or maybe Eric Heiden — and that was it. And we all hated those “up close and personal” portraits of the athletes, so the network may have stopped doing them, and there’s even less to talk about.
I have the NBC Olympic app on Roku. It is activated because I have YouTube TV, but other TV streaming services work too.
Simply click on the sport and it has a link to all the live, previous, and future coverage with the date and time.
I’ve watched the triathlon, archery, badminton, and ping pong.
Politics has always been part of The Olympics. Is the author not aware of 1972 as one example?!
The LGBTQPedoHateWhites cause in sports is a win-win for the left. They've put us into a position in which they either win either by forcing us to watch their LGBTQPedoHateWhites sermonizing, or we quit watching our American pride sports.
NBC showed the first three rotations at the top of the show, but when it came down to the floor exercise to determine the winner, NBC said they would come back to it later but first let's go to swimming.
They had a captive audience, and they held back the prime viewing event for another hour before showing the conclusion of the women's gymnastics event.
-PJ
Other than posts on FR, we are skipping the woke Olympics and patches wimpy Whitney and unAmerican US team. I would call it a boycott if we even remotely cared about the Olympics, but we don’t.
The Olympics don’t have a monopoly. All these sports exist with their own international federations and championships. The only the Olympics do is hold all these sports at once. Cause nobody else is dumb enough to try that logistical nightmare. That’s not a monopoly.
I don’t think anyone would have given her grief if she had just come out and said that. But she didn’t. And the USOC initially came out with a stupid announcement about a “medical issue,” too.
Who wants to watch a bunch of woke narcissistic athletes slandering our values and our country???…it seems no more than a sex festival for fit young people…burning man for the young with some sports events thrown into the mix…
Actually, she did.
I saw/heard her say just that in an interview while the team competition was still going on (being broadcast)
If this has not been broadly publicized, it is prolly because NBC, having lost its star, saw controversy as a hook.
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