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The Olympics are almost here (tips and thoughts)

I don't watch a lot of regular sports or network TV so I was shocked to find out that the Olympics in Athens (that everyone is predicting may be a disaster due to poor planning) starts in just one week from today.

In the states, NBC is using their stable of stations: network NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, Telemundo, and their new NBC HDTV channel to show what they say is their most complete TV coverage of the events to date. I can still remember watching the Red channel, White channel, and Blue channel 24 hour coverage back in 1992 on my parents' giant old satellite dish, which seemed to show even the most obscure sports, but maybe NBC is telling the truth that 2004 will even outdo 1992.

When it comes to recording this stuff on a PVR, your best friend will be NBC's TV listing page here. If you just want results, as soon as they happen, NBC has a nice results page as well.

Personally, I'm interested in cycling and soccer, which rarely get any play among the countless hours and hours of gymnastics and diving coverage (both sports which, in my opinion, are judged merely on how you negatively deviate in the slightest from perfection, which I think a lot of people enjoy doing to others :). Unfortunately, NBC isn't listing their TV schedules by sports, so you'll have to hunt around to find your favorites (the first cycling event will be on Saturday, the 14th, Soccer starts a week from today on Wednesday).

What's amusing to me is that NBC will do the same dumb thing they've done in the past, which gets dumber every passing year: tape delay events. Americans are big people, not children, and if an event happens at 4:30am, true fans will do their best to catch it (either live, on tape, or TiVo). But NBC can't sell ad slots, so they'll hold stuff off until 8pm when they can get the big bucks and edit events into a blur of biographies featuring sunsets, struggles, and plenty of violin soundtracks. But in the age of the internet, you'll know results as they happen, hours before they ever get on TV. I hated this during the Japan games, and purposely had to avoid some sports sites to wait until I could watch the events later.

You know what's going to be big at this year's olympics? Bittorrent. Even the Opening Ceremonies are delayed by several hours in the US, and my guess is that you'll find crisp, digital copies of BBC or other EU network recordings soon after they happen, and before they show in the US, as DivX files on torrent servers.

You know what I'd do if I were NBC? Provide downloadable video of all sports, regardless of whether or not they aired on TV. Plus, I'd toss ads into them. You probably can't air coverage of Archery on NBC in primetime, but imagine if you had every Archery event on the NBC servers. I bet companies selling bows and arrows would jump at the chance to buy an 30 second slot in a online-only video. You'd have happy fans and happy advertisers, because both NBC's content and their advertising could reach their perfect audience: superfans.

Here's my prediction: if in a couple months we hear NBC claim that internet downloads of pirate sports recordings cost them millions in lost revenue, know that a savvy network could have turned that kind of demand into a revenue source (via ads in downloadable video), instead of letting folks route around their damage. If NBC can't look at someone cruising dozens of shady websites, then waiting hours to download a couple hours of shoddy video as extreme demand for something they'd happily pay for, then NBC has bigger problems than I thought.

Oh, this will be the first HDTV olympics, but NBC hasn't bothered to put anything on the website they've been advertising for months. A "coming soon" message a week before launch can't be a good sign.

by Matt Haughey August 4, 2004 in News

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