TVoholic.com: Full episode reviews of your favorite TV shows & news about television

NBC Olympics Coverage: the best thing for network television in a while, or?

By fred | August 19, 2008

I am astonished when I read what NBC is doing, and what really sickens me is the response they get. NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker couldn’t be happier about this whole thing,as he recently declared on CNBC : “There’s no question we did the right thing in holding the Opening Ceremony to air in prime time on NBC that night. The excitement that built out of word of mouth that the opening ceremony was the most spectacular thing that people had seen, that China had wanted to make a statement and they made a statement and people wanted to see that.”

As far as they’re concerned, it was the best only thing to do. Men, I just hope they don’t air the Superbowl live but wait for 24 hours, to let word of mouth go on and get people excited about the game, because that makes just as much sense to me. (Plus, they could still put a bug “LIVE” on the screen, to get people to think it’s actually live…) Do you realize that, had men not walk on the Moon already, if that was going to happen today, right now, then the entire world would witness Neil Armstrong (or whoever it would be today) set foot on the Moon as he does it, the entire world but the US.

No, because in the US there would be some 12h delay to make sure word of mouth got everyone excited and NBC is ready to air the whole thing in primetime the way they want it to. Because people don’t walk on the Moon when they do, but when NBC decides it’s good for them. Because the Olympics ceremony doesn’t start when it does, but when NBC feels like pressing “Play”.

NBC even had the swimming competitions moved around so that it “could” air live at the right time on the East Coast in the US, so they wouldn’t “have to” use tape delay. Which, of course, they still did for the West Cost, because those guys shouldn’t be able to watch it live. Well, they did though, only it was “live” as per NBC definition, which means “live from a tape recording”.

Because even when you’re watching events that are everything but live, it still says “LIVE” on NBC, cause that gives an impression of live urgency and it sells more. I mean, according to an NBC spokesperson, because they couldn’t remove it. Plus, why would they ? “You assume there’s a large amount of intelligence in the viewing audience, so when they see those twice-an-hour time stamps they’ll understand what is being presented.” Riiight…

I’m really quite disgusted by this whole thing, but what’s worse is they at NBC, this is the greatest thing they couldn’t have ever done : Disrespecting the viewers, trying to go back in time instead of making use of the fact that they could use other networks of NBCU and Internet website to create a definite truly-live coverage of the games, lying to the viewers, those are what NBC believes is the future of network television.

And they’re not alone, because CBS’ chief executive Leslie Moonves sent a note of congratulation to Mr. Zucker; and Tony Ponturo, who heads advertising in sports events for Anheuser-Busch, said that “it’s hard to say anything is a 10 out of 10 these days, but I can’t think of anything negative about what’s been going on with NBC“.

In his CNBC interview, Zucker also said that “the erosion in network television has been pronounced, and there’s no way of getting around that. But the fact is, this event shows that the pipes work, and that if you put on great programming that people wanna watch, then they’ll show up. And that’s what happened on NBC.” Only thing is, NBC did not put on great programming that people could watch, they faked it and tried to force them to watch it when they felt it should be watched.

I don’t know, maybe it’s me… so, how do you feel about all of this ? Are you fine watching the Olympics from prerecorded tapes ? Do you think it would have been a bad idea to show the opening ceremony or Phelps’ records live (you know, as in when it was happening, not when the tape was being played), and was best to wait to please advertisers ?

Posted in News