July 31st, 2012
I love–love–it when hipsters are so rooted in their own provincialism that they move from ignorance to outrage without even noticing. For case #5,034, let’s look at the incessant carping about NBC’s Olympics coverage.
Guy Adams and the Twitter hordes have been complaining and mocking NBC for failing to present the Olympics precisely as they would like. Which is fine. NBC’s presentation isn’t exactly what I’d prefer either. (More on this in a minute.) But what’s embarrassing is that the #NBCFAIL whining isn’t just a complaint that NBC isn’t doing what they’d like, but rather that NBC is objectively failing.
The nub of the #NBCFAIL complaint is, I think, that NBC/Uni/Comcast isn’t showing enough events live, that the primetime cut-reel shows are hopelessly stale, and that NBC has missed the Information Age revolution where everyone knows everything instantaneously, information wants to be free, and blah-blah-blah.
A few thoughts:
* Does the NBC primetime presentation stink? Probably. It’s not my cuppa and there are aspects of it–such as when they run a 3 minute package hyping the medal chances of the men’s gymnastics team even though we already know that the squad got hosed–which seem positively ludicrous. And for people who are interested in sports and not melodrama, the network’s insistence on “storytelling” remains pretty irritating.
* Even if you take this tape-delay / storytelling model as given, NBC doesn’t look (at least to my eyes) as nimble as they should be. They ought to be able to package finished events in ways which feed the story as it actually happened, rather than according to the pre-determined narrative going into the events. For instance, last night they could have run a package for the men’s gymnastics team hinting at danger and tragedy, rather than underdog triumph.
* All of that said, what would you have NBC do? They paid $1.2 billion for this two-week window of programming. They’re a publicly-held concern and their duty is not to maximize the enjoyment of a handful of leading-edge audience members on Twitter. Their job is to recoup as much of their money as they can. (And use the window to launch their Fall slate of shows.)
* That’s why they do “storytelling.” It bugs me, but you know who loves it? The female viewers who make performance/sports like figure skating and gymnastics such ratings monsters.
* And that’s why they tape-delay all of the good stuff for primetime. Because while there are thousands (and thousands!) of Twitter users who want to spend their work day watching the live events in a Starbucks on their iPads, 10.5 million households tuned in to the Monday night broadcast.
* The same people who insist that everyone has cut the cord on cable and the everyone uses Netflix Instant and that everyone gets stuff from the torrents fail to understand that they are highly atypical consumers. They’re like the Mondale supporters aghast because no one they know voted for Reagan.
* But even if NBC was to court this niche audience, it’s not clear to me that there’s all that much money in it. And probably not enough to justify risking the rest of the revenue platform for the Games.
* Finally, people have been complaining about the lousiness of tape-delay Olympics coverage since the 1988 Seoul Games. But instead of understanding that this is just the nature of the beast, today’s Twitter generation thinks that This Time It Should Be Different.
Because . . . Internet!
* In parting, I’d note that this is the same thinking which led people to believe that the Iranian regime would fall a couple years ago and that the Egyptian revolution would be a great step toward liberalism in the Middle East.
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Barro’s with you on this http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-31/stop-whining-about-nbc-s-olympics-coverage.html
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“NBC doesn’t look as nimble as they should be” is a whopper of an understatement. The commercial break prior to Missy Franklin’s epic win announced an interview with “gold medalist, Missy Franklin.” They either need to embrace the fact that people who care already know the results (NBC hasn’t), or run a much tighter ship (to include the mens’ gymnastics ‘oops’ you mentioned).
And with 7 or 8 channels, how hard would it be to run live coverage of events on one of them (to include during the wee hours), and keep their primetime coverage as is? It seems so easy to placate those who are outraged. Maybe that’s why they’re outraged.
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The unspoken element here is that the “information” isn’t as “free” as it was in 2008, since the digital switchover effectively removed broadcast service to most areas outside of big cities without the use of a large directional antenna. We’d be fine with NBC prime-time coverage (my wife misses it), but we can’t afford to erect a long-range antenna on our house (a rental anyway), and don’t want to sign up for 2 years of satellite to watch the olympics (again, we rent and probably won’t stay here that long). So the broadcast networks we grew up with as kids are effectively pay channels now, and ones you can’t get a la carte.
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The heart of the TV audience for the Olympics is women who like stories more than they like sports. NBC gives them what they like.
Galley Friend J.E. July 31, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Do it for the gals! Yes, a brief truce in the War on Women.
I wonder what these critics, whose Twitter access costs them nada, would do if a zillion bucks of their own money was at stake. Even with the high unemployment rate, most people just aren’t in front of their tubes during the day to see the commercials that are paying for this.
This is the reason the World Series no longer has day games, and that the SB starts at almost 7 e.s.t.