Here are a couple things you need to know: NBC does not operate as a not-for-profit. And a large portion of the massive Olympics audience is made up of non-traditional sports viewers who could care less about watching tape delay in prime time.
So go ahead and complain all you want about NBC saving the best stuff for primetime during the Olympics. While you whine, NBC is laughing all the way to the ratings bank.
Nothing validates NBC’s tape-delay strategy more than the huge ratings for its primetime coverage. The network is breaking all sorts of records.
From NBC:
Through the first three nights of the London Olympics, NBC is averaging 35.8 million viewers, the best through the first weekend for any Summer Olympics in history (since the 1960 Rome Olympics, the first televised Olympics), 1.4 million more than the 1996 Atlanta Olympics (34.4 million), and five million more viewers than 2008 Beijing Olympics (30.6 million).
Keep in mind, NBC expected ratings to be off from Beijing, which did have live coverage of events in primetime. With such a strong start, this could be a highly successful Olympics for the network
NBC received a valuable endorsement for its primetime approach from CBS Corp CEO Leslie Moonves. From Broadcasting & Cable:
“They had no alternative to do that. What are they going to do in primetime? They would have had to show events at 5 o’clock in the morning,” Moonves told B&C. “They don’t happen that way. If you don’t want to know the result, don’t go online. If you want to know the result, go online. But I don’t know what people expected of them and I think they’re doing a very good job of balancing it. I really do.”
Moonves also said that if the Olympics aired on CBS, he would most likely employ the same tape-delay strategy to preserve the primetime viewership.
“I’m sure it took a lot of thought went into it, but I think almost definitely we would have done the same thing,” he said. “I think they’re handling it very well, I really do, I think they’re doing a good job.”
As I wrote last week, according to NBC’s statistics, nearly half of the overall viewership of the Olympics is made up of people who never watch one minute of ESPN during the year. These aren’t typical sports fans who are scanning the various sites looking for the latest news and results in baseball, football, etc.
They are mostly women who tune in to watch the stories and drama of this once-every-four-years phenomenon. They couldn’t tell you Derek Jeter from Russell Westbrook, but they were heartbroken for Jordyn Wieber Sunday.
As long as the ratings keep coming in, NBC has no reason to shift from its strategy. And if you want to complain. Go ahead. It’s an Olympic tradition.
“They are mostly women who tune in to watch the stories and drama of this once-every-four-years phenomenon. They couldn’t tell you Derek Jeter from Russell Westbrook, but they were heartbroken for Jordyn Wieber Sunday.” REALLY? Times have changed – NBC needs to explore new ways of making revenue in the 21st century instead following the 1950’s Olympic Model – but then again I am just a dumb viewer.
Donna, darling, read Ed’s copy. NBC knows what it’s doing. The executives there have analyzed the facts, figured out what women want and they’re giving it to them. The fact that you may not like the way they behave is a problem you have with women not with NBC.
If NBC wants to show the best of the best in prime time, fine, let them. As said, there are a lot of people who both a) don’t normally watch sports and b) can only watch TV during prime time because of work, etc, and getting the chance to see these events during that period of time, great, whatever.
That doesn’t mean that NBC can’t show, live on TV, those same events as well. The gymnastics finals could be shown live on NBC when it aired in the morning for those who have the ability to catch it, and then they can re-air it for primetime for the millions of people, again perhaps the majority of people tuning in currently, to watch then. The ratings hit NBC would take from such a strategy would be minimal at best.
The “oh you can watch things live online” comes with a huge catch. Quite a few people over the years have given up their cable or satellite packages because the cost wasn’t worth it to them, but now suddenly NBC is going to punish these penny-pinchers by forcing them to re-add a package with MSNBC/CNBC just so they can watch live events online?
Its not good when there was a Yahoo article posted on its main page that told people how to use british VPNs or proxies to view BBC’s far superior streams instead. The amount of people that will take advantage of this are very minimal and will likely not affect NBC’s ratings machine, though, so they can let the few that care about the substance go away and cater mostly to the many who care only about the style.
You’re right, bottom line its a big success for them financially. Their old-style means of broadcast have clashed directly with the new-style means brought about by twitter and the like, and somehow and someway NBC has gotten the old style to prevail, for now. The new-style is stubborn though, and enough tweets and blog posts and public complaints will eventually leave their mark. All they’re really asking is for those events to be aired on TV live somewhere. NBC, NBC Sports Network, MSNBC, wherever.
Forcing Americans to either wait until primetime to actually see on TV what happened while avoiding pretty much the entire internet to avoid spoilers, or resort to using british proxies to actually view the things they’re interested in online without having to pay money for a cable/satellite package they’re otherwise uninterested in, is NOT defensible. They can re-air the events in primetime all they want, they must air them on TV, LIVE when they’re happening for the oh-so-few of us who actually care about such things.