NBC’s illegitimate Olympic omnipotence

Somehow, no one at NBC got the memo about that whole “media landscape changing” thing. In an era of instant news, the network has decided to tape delay and pre-package many of the big ticket events of the 2010 Winter Olympics. NBC claims the decision will result in higher ratings during the all important prime time hours. They’re probably correct. But the decision is crass and cynical. What NBC is doing is pushing back against consumer control of media intake (and part of a larger trend of big media producers being more aggressive in the last year – more on that in another post).

There is much to say about NBC’s tape delay approach as it relates to the media ecosystem. But let me explain why I find myself irrationally angry about the situation; I see sport as one of the last entertainment forms that regularly delivers the unexpected. Sports of all kind provide surprises. And high profile televised sporting events, whether the Super Bowl, the World Cup, or the Olympics, become a collective experience. They are events that used to produce water cooler chat the next day. But now, social media has expanded that sense of shared experience, making it more immediate. Events that we once watched with our families and friends in the living room are now the moments when Facebook and Twitter feel most alive.

By tape delaying the big events at the 2010 Olympics — to the extent of shifting broadcast times within the United States — NBC robs us all of that collective experience. NBC’s approach to broadcasting the Olympics is grounded in the notion that the best type of audience is an atomized one.

I’m not going to take a hard line stance on the issue. If the Olympics were taking place half a world away at 4am, I would very much appreciate some tape delayed action. And were NBC to provide live broadcasts, they probably would do well to also package up the big events and re-broadcast them during prime time (an approach that seems to be working quite well for the PGA). But with the games on the west coast of North America, there is no reason for NBC not to broadcast events live as they happen. Forcing us to conform to their broadcast schedule feels like misguided and outdated thinking by corporate executives.