“NBC, which owns the exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the United States, spent most of Friday trying to keep it that way.posted by ericb at 9:56 AM on August 9, 2008
NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.
In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.
As the first Summer Games of the broadband age commenced in China, old network habits have never seemed so archaic — or so irrelevant.
‘The Olympics to me is a benchmark for how fast we’ve gone with technology,’ Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm in New York, said. ‘Thirty months ago, no one was talking about YouTube. Now, it’s a verb.’
Two years ago, during the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, offered only two hours of live coverage on the Internet. This year, it is putting a staggering 2,200 hours online in scores of video feeds.
But NBC, which paid $894 million for the exclusive rights to the Olympic broadcast in the United States, intends to show some premier events like swimming live on television only to reach a wider audience and charge higher rates for advertising.
Although the numbers are not yet available, NBC’s tape-delayed version of the opening ceremonies will almost certainly be watched by more Americans than the live Internet streams. Steven J. Farella, the president and chief executive of the TargetCast TCM media agency in New York, said that ‘if the question is, ‘is this a big issue?’ the answer is, ‘not yet.’ ‘
‘Right now, people can go on the Internet to watch, but not enough will because it’s not the same experience,’ he added. ‘People love TV and still like to get entertainment that way.’ However, he added, by the Summer Games in 2012, ‘Olympic ad sales could be turned upside down.’”
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It was pretty damn cool though.
posted by NoMich at 9:31 PM on August 8, 2008