As the Olympic’s of London 2012 began it appeared that NBS, who has paid just over $1 billions for TV rights in the USA, had it’s streaming strategy in place and working. But not long after the opening ceremony did complaints begin to flood in about NBC’s coverage of the Olympics.
Ability to view the coverage by NBC was subject to a few things… 5 hour delays of events and you need a subscription to NBC to even start viewing it. Meanwhile here in the UK we can view almost every event live during the Olympics, as it happens and without paying anything more than our TV license! Oh and we can do it online and view it though freeview and sky!
But there are a few other things getting our US based friends rattled:
- Putting Advertisers First
For those in the UK think of this like watching football on ITV or SKY, only with adverts during the event. No body minds it really either side of the event but during it is just plain wrong. So what have NBC done? They’ve put adverts through most events, they appear to just be a time gap or two apart with no respect for each event. - No Live Stream
You would think if a company asks you to subscribe to view content they would do their best to get it to you live, even if its in the middle of the night (see SKY payperview showing boxing at 3am in the uk). But NBC refuse to live stream, this could just be part of their deal for coverage but we some how doubt that. A large proportion of the complaints we’ve seen on twitter, facebook and google are shouting about not caring about the time they want to see it live. This issue links to … - Dropping The Social Ball
Even with non-live events the first showing of almost any tv programme will get a huge amount of social traffic. For a sporting event this can be more than a little annoying, people talking about the results! It’s like waiting a few days to go and see a film only to accidentally read a review with so so many spoilers that there is no point watching the film. Further to this NBC has had one tweeter banned because he published an NBC exec’s email address for people to complain too.
Overall NBC have really dropped the ball with the London 2012 olympics.
You can read more about the NBC problem over at ReadWriteWeb
Thank you for reading NBC Olympic Strategy is Falling Apart, originally published on TechDrink. Ben Greenwood is the founder and editor of TechDrink. You can follow him on Twitter and Google+. You can also follow TechDrink on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.