Every sports fan in the U.S., it seems, has a story of how badly NBC has screwed up their London Olympics-viewing experience. So far the widespread fury has spawned a popular hashtag, #NBCfail, numerous Twitter parodies, outrage over a tribute to terrorism victims that was cut from the opening ceremony, and the brief banning of a British journalist from Twitter.
It’s not just about the network’s insistence on waiting to show events on TV that took place up to 16 hours earlier; any fan with a TiVo and a work schedule must at some point get used to the game of waiting and avoiding spoilers. Besides, a cable subscription and an Internet connection will yield you as many hours of online coverage as you can handle.
No, it’s the fact that NBC seems insistent on spoiling its own coverage across as many forms of media as possible because its left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
The Today Show promo incident is the best-known example. Fans sat down to watch Missy Franklin compete in the 100m backstroke, only to see a teaser for her appearance on NBC the following morning complete with Franklin flashing her gold medal before the time-delayed race had even started. (The network has since apologized.) Worse, though, is that NBC’s balkanized approach to the Olympics is spoiling its live online coverage.
If you were watching Michael Phelps in the 200m butterfly Tuesday via the network’s Live Extra iPad app, according to the Los Angeles Times, and you also had the NBC Olympics app, your enjoyment would be ruined by a notification from the second app popping up to tell you Phelps had won while he still had a good 50 meters to go in Live Extra.
The Times jumped on this as proof that NBC’s live streams are slightly delayed too. I have no problem with that; there are any number of reasons why a video feed from across the world might run a little slow. My question is: Why on Earth would NBC have two separate Olympics apps that don’t talk to each other?
No wonder thousands of us are fleeing for the commercial-free comfort of BBC Olympic coverage, any place we can find it.
Big Media Malaise
I don’t want to pile on the Peacock in particular; I have no idea whether CBS or ABC or Fox could do a better job. The problem with all the networks is simply this: They’re large media organizations with many disparate parts, most of which tend to exist in competition with each other.
I saw this in person during my 13 years at Time Inc., particularly after it was taken over by AOL. Every day, thousands of well-groomed media executives would talk about the search for synergy, the industry’s favorite buzzword. In reality, those executives were really focused on protecting and expanding their department’s budget.
To be territorial, in that vast corporate landscape, is only natural. Why work with a strange team from the other side of the company, when their success might affect your team’s bottom line? Why give your best stuff away? Keep the glory for yourself, and the CEO will certainly know your name.
And let’s not even get into the problems of pleasing advertisers, affiliates, business partners and shareholders. Suffice to say that the larger and more public the organization, the more masters it serves.
Put a Startup on It
Now imagine what would happen if we handed Olympic coverage to a tech-savvy startup. They’d focus on the solution. There’d be no room for in-fighting or disintegration. A core team of engineers would work tirelessly to ensure seamless coverage on every platform you can imagine. Ads would appear at the bottom of the screen, YouTube-style, rather than constantly interrupting the action. Notifications and tweets would be timed to perfection.
The TV networks all of them could grab as much of the feed as they wished. The Olympics would become open-source. An event that claims to celebrate sportsmanship and team play would finally be seen, in the U.S., in a way that lives up to those ideals.
Don’t hold your breath, though. NBC paid $4.38 billion last year for exclusive rights to broadcast the summer and winter Olympics through 2020. The best we can hope for is that the network learns from its 2012 mistakes, and hands all forms of Olympic coverage over to a small and well-coordinated team, a startup within.
