PVRBlog has a good little rant on how NBC probably won’t do a good job covering the Olympics this year no matter how hard they try. It’s a tough problem: there are many more events than you can cover at any one time. Only some are very popular, but all have at least a small following. Since it’s happening in Greece, many events will occur in the middle of the night in the US, so internet reporting will beat network tape delay with the results. Here’s Matt Haughey’s suggestion:
You know what I’d do if I were NBC? Provide downloadable video of all sports, regardless of whether or not they aired on TV. Plus, I’d toss ads into them. You probably can’t air coverage of Archery on NBC in primetime, but imagine if you had every Archery event on the NBC servers. I bet companies selling bows and arrows would jump at the chance to buy an 30 second slot in a online-only video. You’d have happy fans and happy advertisers, because both NBC’s content and their advertising could reach their perfect audience: superfans.
Here’s my prediction: if in a couple months we hear NBC claim that internet downloads of pirate sports recordings cost them millions in lost revenue, know that a savvy network could have turned that kind of demand into a revenue source (via ads in downloadable video), instead of letting folks route around their damage. If NBC can’t look at someone cruising dozens of shady websites, then waiting hours to download a couple hours of shoddy video as extreme demand for something they’d happily pay for, then NBC has bigger problems than I thought.
If NBC had been thinking, they also could have plugged TiVo as the ultimate Olympics platform. Considering how much Olympics tickets cost, $99 for a TiVo box isn’t very much. They could air as many events as possible and supply very specific program data to TiVo so that viewers could set up Season Passes to certain sports. TiVo works 24 hours a day, so if a sport you cared about were on late at night it would still get recorded. Sure, people might still fast forward through the ads, but it’s better to have them fast forwarding through them then not have recorded them in the first place. (Networks would be well advised to do this with prime time television as well. Instead of worrying who’s going to win the Survivor/Friends battle this week, NBC and CBS could each rerun their primetime lineups late at night so that TiVo owners (and viewers with unusual schedules) could watch both.)
For as much time as networks spend trying to stifle new technology, none of them have realized how many hours there are between the end of the Late Late Show and the beginning of the Morning Show.