KEEPS ON TICKING: I watched a lot of Olympics these last two weeks, and I saw some pretty incredible and laudable things: Vinokourov taking the men's road race to finish his cycling career; the fastest 800-meter race in history (it is possible that every entrant in that race, or at least the first five, set records for their places of finish; that is, the fastest second-place of all time, the fastest third-place, etc.); Kim Yeong-koun putting the hammer down again and again even though everybody knew the ball was coming to her; McKayla Maroney's perfect vault, followed by her meme, followed by her coopting her meme; Usain Bolt continuing to look like a complete alien being once he unfurls his legs (note: I left Gabby Douglas off because I was in a hotel room and missed the all-around, but she did get the iconic photo of the Olympics).
But the most confident, oh-no-you-didn't, finger-wagging show of force at the Olympics?
NBC, of course. I turned on the Games at 9:00 the other night, Tuesday, I think, and they kicked off the hour with a ten minute Mary Carillo piece about Greenwich Mean Time and the invention of the wristwatch. Every single day, NBC packed about twelve hours of competition in a dozen or so sports a day into a four-hour block of tape-delayed highlights, minus maybe 45 minutes or an hour of AT&T and Visa commercials, minus soft-focus athlete profiles, minus previews, replays, parental/coach reaction shots, and pointless sideline interviews (each solemnly commenced with the ceremonial "how does it feel?"), leaving maybe, maybe an hour and a half of actual sports. So for NBC to throw 10 minutes of that away every night on unnecessary Olympic-atmosphere stories was maddening.
But Carillo's time-and-clocks piece wasn't even an atmosphere piece -- it didn't even mention (a) athletes; (b) the Olympics; or (c) sports. NBC can credibly say that the profiles draw in viewers that wouldn't otherwise watch. It can say that people expect the sideline interviews, enjoy the reaction shots, and need the atmosphere pieces to get a sense of the scope and gravity of the Olympics. But who was that piece for? Give me a credible argument that the piece could have improved ratings, benefited advertisers, saved NBC money (how could it have been cheaper to put that piece together than to have aired ten minutes of volleyball/water polo/tae kwon do highlights?) or enhanced any viewer's experience. If I had an ad immediately following that piece, I would be on the phone with my ad sales rep screaming bloody murder.
It seems to me that, by putting on a long dull history piece by a bad sports commentator right in the heart of prime time, NBC was saying something. What it was saying was "we have heard your criticism of our coverage, and we could not be less interested. For two weeks every four years, you will watch whatever we want you to watch. So tune in in four years, when we will kick off every hour with ten minutes of City Council hearings and/or tentacle porn."
Bert Cooper approves your tentacle porn.
ReplyDeleteThat means you missed the first hour of the program, which was Tom Brokaw singing the praises of England surviving WW II. What a waste.
ReplyDeleteYour mistake is thinking that NBC purchased the Olympic broadcasting rights becaue it wanted to broadcast a sports program. It didn't; it wants to broadcast an Olympic-themed entertainment reality-show. And it does this because that is the program that attracts the best demographic-weighted ratings. We know this, because otherwise ESPN would win the bidding war and put on a show that Isaac and Ted would prefer to watch.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I was about to mention that. I couldn't believe how quickly I watched the prime time show last night, as I just skipped all of that.
ReplyDeleteWhat entertainment-reality shows would show us 10 minutes of the history of Greenwich mean time, as read by a barely literate tennis commentator? NBC doesn't put that on because it's part of the reality show they are putting together. I think they do it because they care more about keeping the talent (Carrillo, brokaw) busy and happy than about what will draw or keep eyeballs.
ReplyDeleteNBC is going to get a rude shock in 2016 and 2020 when even more people have access to proper sports coverage from semi-legal sources like the BBC.
ReplyDeleteI believe I heard that 7 of 8 runners in the 800 set personal best times.
ReplyDeleteAs far as NBC's coverage: I gave up after the first few days and would only tune in if there was something I knew I wanted to see, and then I had to hope they would tell me early on about what time it was coming on.
Worse than the history of the wristwatch was Carillo's 10 minute biography of Ian Fleming followed IMMEDIATELY by a commercial for the new James Bond commercial.
ReplyDeleteAlso Friday night's (I think) 30 minute documentary wasted on a bunch of old NBA players from 1992.
Worse than the history of the wristwatch was Carillo's 10 minute biography of Ian Fleming followed IMMEDIATELY by a commercial for the new James Bond commercial.
ReplyDeleteAlso Friday night's (I think) 30 minute documentary wasted on a bunch of old NBA players from 1992.
Seriously, that was crazy. My work schedule meant I missed out on a lot of the games, but there were some unexpectedly free hours and I was excited to catch up. Until i saw NBC was the Brokaw History Channel. I actually thought perhaps they had some kind of technical difficulty and were just running (unplanned) filler.
ReplyDeleteWorst of all: Interrupting the closing ceremony last night to show the pilot of some insipid sitcom, and not showing The Who until after midnight. That wasn't just tape delay. That was delayed tape delay. For a show that, judging by the first five minutes (which was all I could bear to watch) will last about three episodes.
ReplyDeleteMy household was absolutely infuriated by that, as were half the people on my Facebook feed. Worst programming decision ever.
ReplyDeleteYou pay billions to show the Olympics...so how about showing the Olympics?
ReplyDeleteYup. And the sitcome was, indeed, horrible.
ReplyDeleteOk -- for the record, the most exciting Olympic event I've seen in the last 20 years was a random biathalon final which I watched from a Rome hotel room with a BBC feed. Thrilling, and exactly what the Olympics are supposed to be. I agree that most of what NBC did was awful, and I would love to find an alternative.
ReplyDeleteBUT, someone has to argue the other side here. First, we have to assume that NBC's primary aim here is to maximize revenue, which basically means maximizing eyeballs. But after that basic assumption, are we also to assume every single person at NBC is an idiot? Are we to assume that they don't hear these comments? Isn't it possible that their method of presenting the Olympics -- while grotesque and incomprehensible to us -- is actually the most ratings-friendly way to present them? I don't know what the utility was of the Carillo piece or the Browkaw blathering, but don't you think someone at NBC does?
I do know that the average viewship of the Tour de France (on NBC's networks) was 409,000 viewers. The average viewership of Sportscenter is 600,000. Perhaps the closest analog, the soccer World Cup, averaged 2.86 million viewers. It looks like NBC was averaging around 25 million for its prime-time Olympics coverage. We might not be the target audience, but it looks like they're doing something right.
Counter-argument: The previous 200 weeks since the last Summer Olympics indicates that no, no one at NBC knows how to maximize ratings.
ReplyDeleteHang on. Do you mean to say that you don't think McKayla Maroney had the iconic photo of the Olympics?
ReplyDeleteHang on. Do you mean to say that you don't think McKayla Maroney had the iconic photo of the Olympics?
ReplyDeleteHang on. Do you mean to say that you don't think McKayla Maroney had the iconic photo of the Olympics?
ReplyDeleteThis is where I part ways with Ted and disagree with you -- I think that most of the things that irritate me are defensible from a bottom-line standpoint, and I wasn't trying to take those on. But I think that the network side of the TV sports industry (like other parts of the entertainment industry) is personality-driven and institutionalized. There is a point in TV sports at which bottom-line considerations yield to personality, ego, and loyalty-driven concerns. So you get Buck, McCarver, and Morgan year-in and year-out, even though everybody hates them. You get somebody saying "Brokaw is coming to London; figure out something for him to do" and "we've already paid Mary Carillo; better give her three segments," and once the segments are produced, somebody has to put them on.
ReplyDeleteYou can't just defend WWII and Greenwich Mean Time by saying "if they aired them, NBC must have had a reason for believing they were economic positives." Classical economic theory doesn't posit that everybody behaves in his own self interest at all times; it posits that, as a group, people tend to behave in their own interest, and that they tend to have worse outcomes (not that they always have worse outcomes, but that they tend to) when they don't. I haven't heard any explanation of how it was in NBC's self-interest to air Carillo's piece. (Brokaw, you could at least argue that keeping Brokaw happy takes $ out of NBC's pocket in this instance but pays a greater divident elsewhere.)
fix: "dividend."
ReplyDeleteAnd all that was me, obviously.
ReplyDeleteI concede that you are likely correct on the narrow point of particularly WTF features, and I am sure you are correct on the issue of personality-driven assignments. But if there's a spectrum of features from WTF to "wow, that really helps me understand the sport/stakes/athlete and I'm glad I saw it," I suspect that NBC as an institution has a better idea of what's going to play best to the largest audience than I do, and I suspect that line is much closer to WTF than I might think.
ReplyDeleteBut let's ask the question differently, and use the most egregious example we've cited -- how do we know was it NOT in NBC's collective self-interest to air the Carillo piece? Do we know that they lost viewers? Do we know how many lack-of-diversity complaints they dodged by putting her on screen? Do we know whether NBC's internal tracking said that viewers were getting tired of straight sports? Yes, it's entirely possible that no-one ever made any specific decision, and that this piece (like so much in any large insititution) was just a result of institutional intertia. But maybe there was a reason unknown to us, and I would be fascinated to know what it is.
Finally, although I'm sure this point been made elsewhere I haven't seen it, and thus I claim it for my own: we all KNEW that if NBC was spending a lot of time on something that wasn't otherwise a marquis event, the USA was going to win. It took a lot of the tension out of things.
Someone wants to watch that. Not me, but I'm not the target audience. Or, it could be a mistake at the margin. The fact that I found the whole thing unwatchable and missed everything except the last seven minutes of USA-Lithuania basketball is apparently more than outweighed by the extended version of a London-travelogue Today Show viewership, since the ratings are higher than the pure sporting event.
ReplyDeleteThey paid billions to have the exclusive right to show the Olympics. Which is ever so materially different.
ReplyDeleteI'm not gonna try to defend NBC, but I will direct you to Mark Lazarus' response if you're interested:
ReplyDeletehttp://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/olympics/2012/writers/richard_deitsch/08/10/NBCs-Mark-Lazarus-responds-to-criticism/index.html
I enjoyed the Olympics thanks to an expansive cable plan and high speed internet (although I'm stilll irritated that verizon on demand advertised they would be listing all events for free on replay...but forgot to mention you'd have to wait til god knows when for said events to actually to be available). If I was dependant on network coverage I would have been really really angry and frustrated. But in a way I find it sad that you have to have all that to enjoy an event that theoretically is supposed to symbolize inclusivity and bring us together as a nation for a few days.
What is the defensible argument for interrupting the closing ceremonies for an hour, at 11 p.m., without warning?
ReplyDeleteAll I see is that NBC has viewers hostage for the next decade or however long they have the rights, and they'll do whatever the heck they want with the Games between now and then, because people will watch the Olympics anyway and have no reasonable threat to switch to a competitor. But I think they've gained a lot of badwill (if goodwill is an economic concept, then badwill should be too).
+5 to Mr. C for the random A Few Good Men reference.
ReplyDeleteI didn't suggest that they lost viewers, which is an empirical question for which we do not have data. I suggested that nobody has yet proposed a cogent explanation for why a segment utterly unrelated to the Olympics, to sports, or to the Olympic experience could in any way have improved the broadcast from the standpoint of ratings, advertising, or viewer experience. The hypothetical that viewers were getting tired of straight sports would satisfy me, except that it doesn't explain the GMT segment (I am assuming that the history of GMT is not a huge ratings draw compared to literally anything else -- featurette on the royal family; British pop stars and celebrity culture; Brit fashion). I'm not buying lack-of-diversity, since much of the focus of the two weeks was on women (including a huge presence for African-American women, especially Felix and Richards-Ross), though, come to think of it, most of the commentary was male (including coverage of track, swimming, women's VB, and gymnastics).
ReplyDeleteUh, and Gabby Douglas, obviously.
ReplyDeleteCan you actually make any argument about economic sensibility when (a) NBC has a monopoly on televised coverage of the Games, and a de facto monopoly on any other visual coverage of the Games (given that you have to break the law to watch it on a non-NBC venue) and (b) we can't do A/B testing - perhaps if they'd showed stuff live or showed non-USA competitors or not showed the stupid non-sports pieces, 40 million people would have watched? When all the ads are bought beforehand, and the only game in town is NBC to watch this stuff, I can't imagine how we can say that all these decisions are based purely on revenue.
ReplyDeleteHow many people would have watched a lot more if they'd had the chance to watch any long sport uninterrupted other than beach volleyball and the gold medal basketball and soccer games? How many people skipped lots and lots of coverage because knowing who wins in advance doesn't How many people watched these Olympics by TiVo'ing prime time and fast-forwarding through the massive WWII and GMT clips and all the repetitive athlete profiles and the bad commentary and the embarassing interviews and just, say, watched each dive or each race or each gymnastics routine and then FF'd to the next one? Are we counting those people in the 25 million who watched? Well yes, I watched, but in each 4 hour prime time block, I probably watched 45 minutes to an hour of actual TV, and FF'd the rest. I cannot understand why NBC would consider that a good thing, and I am 100% sure they're counting me as someone who watched the whole thing.
where's Canadian and the BBC when you need em lol~
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