9 ms·

Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

157 points by jpadilla_ 14y ago

kevinburke 14y ago
Like many people here I would like to believe that the state of the world that ensures the highest profits and the state of the world that makes the most people happy are one and the same. I am coming to think that isn't true.
- kitsune_ 14y ago
  How could that ever be true? As an example: most people would prefer everything to be free, and a company would like to have a monopoly on a necessity and thus the ability to charge arbitrary prices. Or even shorter, everyone wants to get stuff, lots of stuff without having to lift a finger. Out of this, every company-customer relationship has to be dysfunctional. The idea that the economy is a perfectly fair system where everyone profits equally in a transaction is a fairy tale. It completely ignores the imbalances of power inherent in social systems. In a perfectly free market, imbalances of power will be compounded over time, similar to the theory of the big bang where small imperfections of the early universe are fundamental to the large structures that follow.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - philh 14y ago
    > everyone wants to get stuff, lots of stuff without having to lift a finger. We don't know how to make such a world exist. The claim is not, "if we could snap our fingers and make the world look like anything we wanted, the happiest world we could create would also be the world with the most massive profits". It's closer to, "if we want to optimise for happiness going forward from the world we have, then we should also optimise for allowing companies to make profits". (Not to say I agree with the claim, but that particular argument is missing the point.)
  - kevinburke 14y ago
    I was thinking about a service like Uber, which people love, even though it's more expensive. When I take an Uber I don't complain about how I should be getting cab rides for free (although that would be nice) - I revel in how much better the experience is than waiting around for a regular cab.
    - pbreit 14y ago
      Über appeals to maybe 10% of the population.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Do... people... really believe this?
  - _delirium 14y ago
    There's a certain pop-libertarianism that does take this Panglossian view that we live in a perfectly tuned universe, where market dynamics, unless interfered with by the state, always produce the best outcomes, recognizing value and allocating resources. It reminds me a bit of some new-agey environmentalism, which believes that ecosystems always work optimally in a harmonious balance, unless humans interfere with Nature's dynamics. (To be fair, I would say most hardcore libertarian philosophy is based on natural-rights type views, and doesn't make arguments about maximizing outcomes at all.)
  - JonnieCache 14y ago
    If you believe, clap your hands and say, "I believe in the market economics fairy!"
    - pjscott 14y ago
      Hi! I'm the Market Economics Fairy! I help supply and demand equilibriate everywhere! There are a bunch of things that can lead to markets working poorly. For example, transactions are not free. Theoretically, if a rambunctious man could persuade his neighbors to let him blast his stereo at high volume in exchange for a bit of cash, all would be slightly better off -- but since this would require repeated bargaining with a bunch of neighbors, in practice it probably would not happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs Another problem is that humans and fairies are not omniscient, nor are we perfectly economically rational, no matter how much the sparkles in our hearts may ache with yearning to be so! Perhaps there is a way to replace NBC with something far better, and in order to make it happen, all we need is some hard work and a few billion dollars of investment money, carefully applied. If only we had the foresight to take such a gamble -- but in this imperfect world, none of us have the clarity of foresight needed to make such a huge gamble reasonable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality And that's before we need to worry about ugly stuff like regulatory capture and violent coercion! If you can improve any aspect of this situation, I will shoot abundant glitter out of my wand in your honor, and the world will be improved! Sincerely, the market economics fairy!
- locopati 14y ago
  Coming to think? Here, let me help you along. A mining company or an oil company can ensure highest profits by cutting corners (on worker safety, on disposal of toxic waste, on the rights of those around them). Those profits come at the expense of the workers, the people who live near the facilities, the environment around those facilities. Examples are almost too numerous, so I'll give a few recent ones: Massey Energy in West Virginia, BP in the Gulf of Mexico, Royal Dutch Shell the Niger Delta of Nigeria.
  - kevinburke 14y ago
    Oil companies have reputations, and are playing repeated games, not just one off games... in addition they have incentives not to behave this way, such as the large fine and giant loss in shareholder value after BP spilled oil into the Gulf.
    - enneff 14y ago
      Ha ha. Imagine a world where multinationals are held accountable for their mistakes! It took an error the size of the Gulf incident to even draw the public attention. Meanwhile in Nigeria there are hundreds of square kilometres of devastated landscape because of oil company shortcuts. Nobody cares about environmental destruction in far away places. The oil companies have no incentives not to cut corners there.
- kevinburke 14y ago
  Realizing now that this comment came off as way too sappy. Some companies make products that make people happy, and profit as a result. Examples: Apple, Southwest, Uber, Sonic.net, Flip etc. I would like more of these companies to exist, and for companies to focus more on customer satisfaction. To my chagrin it's not clear these companies are any more profitable than their competitors who focus less on customer satisfaction.
therealarmen 14y ago
I understand the frustration, but NBC is just trying to optimize for primetime viewers so they can extract maximum advertising dollars. They paid over $1 billion dollars for the right to broadcast the Olympics and now they must recoup that investment.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  I want to say that they just found a local optimum, and that they're sacrificing long-term viewership for a short-term profit. But who am I kidding? Nobody's going to stop watching NBC permanently because they won't air the olympics in a timely manner.
  - mattbirchler 14y ago
    Exactly. People are not going to stop watching NBC because of this. It's really not a big deal to most people. Most people want to be able to come home from work and watch the biggest events of the day.
    - _delirium 14y ago
      I agree as far as the delay goes, but I think they're handling the spoilers badly. A lot of people are annoyed that they went to http://www.nbcolympics.com/ http://www.nbcolympics.com/ to find a broadcast schedule, or watched the NBC News before the Olympic broadcast, and were told the results of stuff that hadn't aired yet. An option could be to double down on the tape delay, and uniformly embargo results until the airing: pretend that when something airs on NBC is when it really happens, at least for NBC-property purposes.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  That model no longer works in the modern age. Simply put, there is demand for viewing coverage of the olympics that is not being met, thus they are leaving money on the table. Unfortunately for them and for their potential customers they are constraining themselves to a business model that is obsolete. They are doing the equivalent of covering the olympics via newspaper in a television era. They need to provide live streaming coverage of a wide variety of events, whether for free (with ads) or for a fee. That's the minimum bar these days, if they can't meet that bar people will just get their olympics coverage some other way (such as pirated bbc coverage) and NBC will still have lost out on a massive amount of potential revenue. And in the meantime they will have tarnished their brand as well.
pasbesoin 14y ago
Between NBC's behavior (and I'm recalling the unwatchability of the winter [CENSORED] two years ago, as well), the branding bullshit (including special, specific protective legislation), the outsourcing and outsourcing fiascos, and several other things I've already managed to consciously forget, I've already made my decision. I will not seek out one second of coverage. Sportsmanship left the venue, if not always the specific athletes, a long time ago.
cvp 14y ago
Apparently the results of today's 400M Men's swimming individual medley were the lede for NBC Nightly News tonight... before NBC has even aired the race. Just when you thought they couldn't make things worse....
- lkbm 14y ago
  They live-tweeted the opening ceremonies, and today live tweeted events including that one. I'm quite happy to see angry @replies. I don't anticipate them changing how they're doing things mid-games, but maybe they'll realize they made a mistake if every "Such and such just won the blank event!" gets multiple angry responses.
netmau5 14y ago
I miss journalism. How is this a monopoly? Just because I buy a meal doesn't mean I have a monopoly over eating. Can we now construct arguments with cuss words?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - dkrich 14y ago
    That's not a monopoly. That's exclusivity. NBC had to bid against other major networks for the rights to cover the Olympics.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
dkrich 14y ago
Just a thought- NBC is a for-profit company. Because of that they are able to pay hundreds of millions for the rights to cover the Olympics. Because of that, they want the largest viewership. That occurs during primetime. If the tv industry is so "disruptable" as many keep saying, why hasn't it happened? Clearly people want the ability to watch as much shit, wherever, whenever they can, preferably for free. Apparently the problem is that unlike most internet sites, television requires an actual business model. The fact that this guy is literally asking people on an internet blog not to watch what will inevitably be viewed by tens of millions of people kind of does more to prove this point than anything I can say here could.
- melling 14y ago
  I'm not sure why people don't get this. It's pretty obvious that companies need to make money, and that it's big business. I haven't had a TV for almost 3 years and I suffer through missing out on lots of stuff. However, until the economics change (e.g. cable companies die) it's going to be like this for several more years. At least I got a real streaming Superbowl this year. Rather than complain, let's change the economics and help to make the transition faster. Btw, http://justin.tv http://justin.tv is a going place to start in a pinch. :-)
- notatoad 14y ago
  Yesterday's discussion on HN had the price of broadcast rights at $1.1B, not including production costs. The tv industry is not disruptable. Content is expensive, and margins are not huge. People need to stop saying it is disruptable just because they are unhappy with it. There is a ton of inertia behind the entertainment market.
  - jmduke 14y ago
    People saying an industry is disruptable, nine times out of ten, means that people want that industry to be disrupted -- not that such a disruption is easy or even feasible.
    - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
excuse-me 14y ago
Good job the next olympics will be held in a convenient time zone in Brazil. After that I expect all future olympics to be held wherever the biggest TV audience is, so an eternal Beijing olympics for the 21st Century?
eapen 14y ago
This coming from TechCrunch? I ended up turning on NBC (because the enemy of my enemy must be my friend).
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  I had this reaction too. :) Although, I haven't had any kind of problem of the Adbuster type with NVC.
- bridanp 14y ago
  Just seems like someone trying to make a story out of nothing to me. I'm enjoying watching the German men in their gymnastics routine and this women's weight lifting is pretty cool. But I wouldn't have watched it this morning or afternoon live on any device. Sunny Saturdays are not meant for watching television.
jes5199 14y ago
Well, it's not like I own a television set anyway.
ck2 14y ago
Is it purely NBC's fault or the notoriously corrupt IOC's fault?
majormajor 14y ago
Despite how many people on this site and sites like it don't have some kind of cable or satellite service... we're a pretty small minority. Especially when it comes to the group of people interested in watching sports, where live is king, and the online options suck unless you live out of your teams' TV markets. I'm not surprised they're not going out of their way to cater to us. For all the "the model no longer works" comments: what's the proof? The number of people I know complaining about the model is dwarfed by the number of people I know who have cable and have been watching stuff on both TV and online all day long. I've seen a lot of legitimate complaints about how they're handling the time shifting stuff (which, surprisingly to me, has mostly been along the lines of "it's too easy to find out what happened" instead of complaining about the time shifting in the first place), but I don't see a big hole in their delivery system. They don't want to give people less reason to have cable -- and for all the money they could possibly make broadcasting the Olympics for-pay to non-cable subscribers, that's just a couple weeks every couple of years. The real win for them is if you still want to maintain a cable subscription.
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  Exactly. I just find this whole view ridiculous. The whole "cable is evil, I would never have that" or all the "cord cutter" stuff is just on a spectrum that ranges from sensationalism to Adbuster level hysteria against "the Man." It's like this weird, vague, sort-of-reverse-Luddite situation.
- reaganing 14y ago
  I wouldn't mind the requirement to have cable so much if that was all it was. I have cable, but my cable provider does not offer a package with MSNBC so I'm out of luck.
- Retric 14y ago
  IMO, they can easily give people an online only option and still make more money. 500$ for the entire Olympics seamed to any device for the next 2 years. Bean counters say that's not enough, fine 1000$ or whatever, but there is nothing for NBC to gain from not even having the option. PS: Then again I have cable and I have yet to watch any of the Olympics this year, but I assume some people care.
notJim 14y ago
> They’re doing this for a reason: m-o-n-e-y. Uh, yeah. It's something you need in order to run a company. A company that employs people and gives them, guess what? m-o-n-e-y. And how does it do that, and how does it continue doing that? By being profitable, which it does by having (among other things) exclusive content and advertisers who want to be seen alongside that content. But no, NBC should just put all their stuff online, where it's less clear what kind of profit they would make, because fuck them, this is the internet, and money is bad. We internet people can work at companies that don't have a business model or make a profit, so why can't everyone else?
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  The point is that they are pursuing short-term profit and sacrificing customer satisfaction. That's a terrible way to run a company.
  - Negitivefrags 14y ago
    In order to sacrifice customer satisfaction, there is a requirement that the person be your customer. Not giving something to someone for free just because they demand that they should have it is not sacrificing customer satisfaction.
    - axefrog 14y ago
      Yes but if your product is the viewer and your decisions cause the number of viewers to decrease over time, you're damaging your product, and that will reduce the value of that product to your customers.
      - pbreit 14y ago
        Well, the opening ceremonies had the highest US viewership ever (including against US-based Olympics). Are you sure your contention is accurate? In fact, broadcasting the Olympics is a massive _LONG_ term bet since NBC loses tons of money on the games themselves.
  - 14y ago
swanson 14y ago
I can understand a tape delay during the weekdays - hell, I'd even prefer being able to watch at night instead of at 2:30pm EST. But for weekends, it is so stupid. I saw the 400 IM was on at 2:30pm today, so I turned on the tv to NBC - only to see yet another pointless interview with Ryan Seacrest (why is he doing sports coverage??). Had to watch a stream of the race live even though NBC was airing Olypmics coverage at the same time!
emiliobumachar 14y ago
Maybe it's not entirely strategy. I don't know much about web protocols, but I suppose broadcasting a couple dozen live events to millions of people is much easier and cheaper than making recorded events available, which would require sending each of the million viewers an almost unique package in a given instant. Did I assume correctly, or is sending cloned packages not much harder than sending unique ones?
- lmm 14y ago
  Multicast is pretty much dead, it doesn't go through consumer routers. So unless your library is large enough that storing it becomes an issue, it really doesn't make any difference.
wensing 14y ago
Can't wait for the article 4 years from now complaining about Twitter logjamming fans' real-time Olympic tweets with ads from P&G.
b3b0p 14y ago
I do not see any issue here. They are broadcasting the Olympics when the majority of people can actually sit down and watch them instead of in the early hours of the morning when most of us are sleeping. Some people could probably DVR what they want, but not everybody can (the majority?). I have not looked thoroughly, but from what I have read and seen briefly, NBC is working hard to make it easy to view and access online streams of the individual events if you know what you want to watch. I could be wrong though on actually how easy it truly is. Also, the argument about money. They are a company that is in business to make money. Is this not the one of the main reasons for going in business? To make money. Why would they spend all that money on exclusive access if they were going to lose it all?
- bzbarsky 14y ago
  > I could be wrong though on actually how easy it truly is. It's impossible, unless you're already an NBC cable subscriber. If you _are_ an NBC subscriber already, it's only pretty painful (involves passwords you basically never use otherwise and so forth). But yes, they're working hard to make it as easy as they can within the "you can't get this if you're not already one of our customers" constraint.....
bluedanieru 14y ago
How about just don't watch the Olympics at all? The IOC is an awful, awful organization.
- slowpoke 14y ago
  Can't agree more. There are so many reasons to actively boycott the Olympic games, it's plain ridiculous. They should be abolished, as they have nothing to do with sports anymore (did they ever?). It's just one gigantic corporate whorehouse that has ruined pretty much every locality it ever was held at.
  - ramblerman 14y ago
    Interesting sentiments, I don't know the IOC but neither of you are providing any reasoning behind your claims. Out of curiosity, why the hate?
    - slowpoke 14y ago
      For a quick insight see this enumeration: http://www.protestlondon2012.com/10reasons.html http://www.protestlondon2012.com/10reasons.html The IOC is deeply corrupt, and the olympics have long ceased to be about sports. They are about selling officially branded merchandise from official sponsors and simultaneously squashing local competition with ridiculous, speciallly drafted laws, which cricitically impacts the local economy even after the games are long over. It's akin to a swarm of locusts, really. Also, the branding police of the IOC puts the MAFIAA to shame - you might have heard about their petty attempts at censorship ("you may not link to our sites if you report negatively about us!!1!1" or banning anyone from using word combinations such as "London 2012" and "Summer Games" - which the internet of course spitefully ignores).
      - cdcarter 14y ago
        > The IOC is deeply corrupt, and the olympics have long ceased to be about sports. They are about selling officially branded merchandise from official sponsors and simultaneously squashing local competition with ridiculous, speciallly drafted laws, which cricitically impacts the local economy even after the games are long over. It's akin to a swarm of locusts, really. Perhaps on the local level this is all true. But (anecdotally, at the very least) for every viewer I know, it's about national competition between incredible athletes. The excitement about seeing a world record broken, the upsets when an up and coming young fencer takes gold, and the warm feeling I get when my flag is raised and the anthem is played. All of your reasons are why it sucks for the host city. That's a problem that can be solved without sacrificing the best athletic competition in the world.
benevpayor 14y ago
I put this on the IOC more than NBC. World sporting organizations like IOC and FIFA (hell, let's throw in the NCAA while we are at it) have sold their souls. It's just plain sad how corrupt and counter to their mission they have become.
swang 14y ago
According to this article from 2011: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2011/06/olympic-tv-decision-between-nbc-espn-and-fox-could-come-down-today/1 http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2011/06/... > In a break with predecessor Dick Ebersol, new NBC Sports chief Mark Lazarus promises to show all events live rather than saving the best for tape-delayed coverage in prime time. So I guess they figured it's not profitable. But I wonder how many people have been pissed at missing the live coverage, see the results on twitter or the rest of the Internet and then just not bothering to tune in during prime-time? How about charging $X to watch it live online? And if you don't want to pay that money then you can just wait until Prime Time.
ddon 14y ago
I don't know how with you guys, but on my iPad all techcrunch links are always create trouble with safari or even with chrome... I will no longer click on TC links :)
nhangen 14y ago
I pay for cable, but to me that isn't the issue here. The issue is that the results of this event were already posted, tweeted, and shared long before the event aired. It was a Saturday, why wouldn't they just show it live and if they wanted to increase nighttime ratings, just show it again? The NBC Olympic coverage sucks.
pbreit 14y ago
I like watching edited, time-delayed, USA-oriented coverage. Am I lame? The BBC thing is neat but quite unwatchable.
pbreit 14y ago
I'm not a big Comcast fan but I have 90 channels plus 30 mbps Internet for $40/month. Seems reasonable to me, maybe even a bargain.

157 points by jpadilla_ 14y ago

Like many people here I would like to believe that the state of the world that ensures the highest profits and the state of the world that makes the most people happy are one and the same. I am coming to think that isn't true.

kitsune_ 14y ago
How could that ever be true? As an example: most people would prefer everything to be free, and a company would like to have a monopoly on a necessity and thus the ability to charge arbitrary prices. Or even shorter, everyone wants to get stuff, lots of stuff without having to lift a finger. Out of this, every company-customer relationship has to be dysfunctional. The idea that the economy is a perfectly fair system where everyone profits equally in a transaction is a fairy tale. It completely ignores the imbalances of power inherent in social systems. In a perfectly free market, imbalances of power will be compounded over time, similar to the theory of the big bang where small imperfections of the early universe are fundamental to the large structures that follow.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- philh 14y ago
  > everyone wants to get stuff, lots of stuff without having to lift a finger. We don't know how to make such a world exist. The claim is not, "if we could snap our fingers and make the world look like anything we wanted, the happiest world we could create would also be the world with the most massive profits". It's closer to, "if we want to optimise for happiness going forward from the world we have, then we should also optimise for allowing companies to make profits". (Not to say I agree with the claim, but that particular argument is missing the point.)
- kevinburke 14y ago
  I was thinking about a service like Uber, which people love, even though it's more expensive. When I take an Uber I don't complain about how I should be getting cab rides for free (although that would be nice) - I revel in how much better the experience is than waiting around for a regular cab.
  - pbreit 14y ago
    Über appeals to maybe 10% of the population.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Do... people... really believe this?
- _delirium 14y ago
  There's a certain pop-libertarianism that does take this Panglossian view that we live in a perfectly tuned universe, where market dynamics, unless interfered with by the state, always produce the best outcomes, recognizing value and allocating resources. It reminds me a bit of some new-agey environmentalism, which believes that ecosystems always work optimally in a harmonious balance, unless humans interfere with Nature's dynamics. (To be fair, I would say most hardcore libertarian philosophy is based on natural-rights type views, and doesn't make arguments about maximizing outcomes at all.)
- JonnieCache 14y ago
  If you believe, clap your hands and say, "I believe in the market economics fairy!"
  - pjscott 14y ago
    Hi! I'm the Market Economics Fairy! I help supply and demand equilibriate everywhere! There are a bunch of things that can lead to markets working poorly. For example, transactions are not free. Theoretically, if a rambunctious man could persuade his neighbors to let him blast his stereo at high volume in exchange for a bit of cash, all would be slightly better off -- but since this would require repeated bargaining with a bunch of neighbors, in practice it probably would not happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs Another problem is that humans and fairies are not omniscient, nor are we perfectly economically rational, no matter how much the sparkles in our hearts may ache with yearning to be so! Perhaps there is a way to replace NBC with something far better, and in order to make it happen, all we need is some hard work and a few billion dollars of investment money, carefully applied. If only we had the foresight to take such a gamble -- but in this imperfect world, none of us have the clarity of foresight needed to make such a huge gamble reasonable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality And that's before we need to worry about ugly stuff like regulatory capture and violent coercion! If you can improve any aspect of this situation, I will shoot abundant glitter out of my wand in your honor, and the world will be improved! Sincerely, the market economics fairy!
locopati 14y ago
Coming to think? Here, let me help you along. A mining company or an oil company can ensure highest profits by cutting corners (on worker safety, on disposal of toxic waste, on the rights of those around them). Those profits come at the expense of the workers, the people who live near the facilities, the environment around those facilities. Examples are almost too numerous, so I'll give a few recent ones: Massey Energy in West Virginia, BP in the Gulf of Mexico, Royal Dutch Shell the Niger Delta of Nigeria.
- kevinburke 14y ago
  Oil companies have reputations, and are playing repeated games, not just one off games... in addition they have incentives not to behave this way, such as the large fine and giant loss in shareholder value after BP spilled oil into the Gulf.
  - enneff 14y ago
    Ha ha. Imagine a world where multinationals are held accountable for their mistakes! It took an error the size of the Gulf incident to even draw the public attention. Meanwhile in Nigeria there are hundreds of square kilometres of devastated landscape because of oil company shortcuts. Nobody cares about environmental destruction in far away places. The oil companies have no incentives not to cut corners there.
kevinburke 14y ago
Realizing now that this comment came off as way too sappy. Some companies make products that make people happy, and profit as a result. Examples: Apple, Southwest, Uber, Sonic.net, Flip etc. I would like more of these companies to exist, and for companies to focus more on customer satisfaction. To my chagrin it's not clear these companies are any more profitable than their competitors who focus less on customer satisfaction.

therealarmen 14y ago

I understand the frustration, but NBC is just trying to optimize for primetime viewers so they can extract maximum advertising dollars. They paid over $1 billion dollars for the right to broadcast the Olympics and now they must recoup that investment.

pavel_lishin 14y ago
I want to say that they just found a local optimum, and that they're sacrificing long-term viewership for a short-term profit. But who am I kidding? Nobody's going to stop watching NBC permanently because they won't air the olympics in a timely manner.
- mattbirchler 14y ago
  Exactly. People are not going to stop watching NBC because of this. It's really not a big deal to most people. Most people want to be able to come home from work and watch the biggest events of the day.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    I agree as far as the delay goes, but I think they're handling the spoilers badly. A lot of people are annoyed that they went to http://www.nbcolympics.com/ http://www.nbcolympics.com/ to find a broadcast schedule, or watched the NBC News before the Olympic broadcast, and were told the results of stuff that hadn't aired yet. An option could be to double down on the tape delay, and uniformly embargo results until the airing: pretend that when something airs on NBC is when it really happens, at least for NBC-property purposes.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
InclinedPlane 14y ago
That model no longer works in the modern age. Simply put, there is demand for viewing coverage of the olympics that is not being met, thus they are leaving money on the table. Unfortunately for them and for their potential customers they are constraining themselves to a business model that is obsolete. They are doing the equivalent of covering the olympics via newspaper in a television era. They need to provide live streaming coverage of a wide variety of events, whether for free (with ads) or for a fee. That's the minimum bar these days, if they can't meet that bar people will just get their olympics coverage some other way (such as pirated bbc coverage) and NBC will still have lost out on a massive amount of potential revenue. And in the meantime they will have tarnished their brand as well.

pasbesoin 14y ago

Between NBC's behavior (and I'm recalling the unwatchability of the winter [CENSORED] two years ago, as well), the branding bullshit (including special, specific protective legislation), the outsourcing and outsourcing fiascos, and several other things I've already managed to consciously forget, I've already made my decision. I will not seek out one second of coverage. Sportsmanship left the venue, if not always the specific athletes, a long time ago.

cvp 14y ago

Apparently the results of today's 400M Men's swimming individual medley were the lede for NBC Nightly News tonight... before NBC has even aired the race. Just when you thought they couldn't make things worse....

lkbm 14y ago
They live-tweeted the opening ceremonies, and today live tweeted events including that one. I'm quite happy to see angry @replies. I don't anticipate them changing how they're doing things mid-games, but maybe they'll realize they made a mistake if every "Such and such just won the blank event!" gets multiple angry responses.

netmau5 14y ago

I miss journalism. How is this a monopoly? Just because I buy a meal doesn't mean I have a monopoly over eating. Can we now construct arguments with cuss words?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- dkrich 14y ago
  That's not a monopoly. That's exclusivity. NBC had to bid against other major networks for the rights to cover the Olympics.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

dkrich 14y ago

Just a thought- NBC is a for-profit company. Because of that they are able to pay hundreds of millions for the rights to cover the Olympics. Because of that, they want the largest viewership. That occurs during primetime. If the tv industry is so "disruptable" as many keep saying, why hasn't it happened? Clearly people want the ability to watch as much shit, wherever, whenever they can, preferably for free. Apparently the problem is that unlike most internet sites, television requires an actual business model. The fact that this guy is literally asking people on an internet blog not to watch what will inevitably be viewed by tens of millions of people kind of does more to prove this point than anything I can say here could.

melling 14y ago
I'm not sure why people don't get this. It's pretty obvious that companies need to make money, and that it's big business. I haven't had a TV for almost 3 years and I suffer through missing out on lots of stuff. However, until the economics change (e.g. cable companies die) it's going to be like this for several more years. At least I got a real streaming Superbowl this year. Rather than complain, let's change the economics and help to make the transition faster. Btw, http://justin.tv http://justin.tv is a going place to start in a pinch. :-)
notatoad 14y ago
Yesterday's discussion on HN had the price of broadcast rights at $1.1B, not including production costs. The tv industry is not disruptable. Content is expensive, and margins are not huge. People need to stop saying it is disruptable just because they are unhappy with it. There is a ton of inertia behind the entertainment market.
- jmduke 14y ago
  People saying an industry is disruptable, nine times out of ten, means that people want that industry to be disrupted -- not that such a disruption is easy or even feasible.
  - dinkumthinkum 14y ago

excuse-me 14y ago

Good job the next olympics will be held in a convenient time zone in Brazil. After that I expect all future olympics to be held wherever the biggest TV audience is, so an eternal Beijing olympics for the 21st Century?

eapen 14y ago

This coming from TechCrunch? I ended up turning on NBC (because the enemy of my enemy must be my friend).

dinkumthinkum 14y ago
I had this reaction too. :) Although, I haven't had any kind of problem of the Adbuster type with NVC.
bridanp 14y ago
Just seems like someone trying to make a story out of nothing to me. I'm enjoying watching the German men in their gymnastics routine and this women's weight lifting is pretty cool. But I wouldn't have watched it this morning or afternoon live on any device. Sunny Saturdays are not meant for watching television.

jes5199 14y ago

Well, it's not like I own a television set anyway.

ck2 14y ago

Is it purely NBC's fault or the notoriously corrupt IOC's fault?

majormajor 14y ago

Despite how many people on this site and sites like it don't have some kind of cable or satellite service... we're a pretty small minority. Especially when it comes to the group of people interested in watching sports, where live is king, and the online options suck unless you live out of your teams' TV markets. I'm not surprised they're not going out of their way to cater to us. For all the "the model no longer works" comments: what's the proof? The number of people I know complaining about the model is dwarfed by the number of people I know who have cable and have been watching stuff on both TV and online all day long. I've seen a lot of legitimate complaints about how they're handling the time shifting stuff (which, surprisingly to me, has mostly been along the lines of "it's too easy to find out what happened" instead of complaining about the time shifting in the first place), but I don't see a big hole in their delivery system. They don't want to give people less reason to have cable -- and for all the money they could possibly make broadcasting the Olympics for-pay to non-cable subscribers, that's just a couple weeks every couple of years. The real win for them is if you still want to maintain a cable subscription.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago
Exactly. I just find this whole view ridiculous. The whole "cable is evil, I would never have that" or all the "cord cutter" stuff is just on a spectrum that ranges from sensationalism to Adbuster level hysteria against "the Man." It's like this weird, vague, sort-of-reverse-Luddite situation.
reaganing 14y ago
I wouldn't mind the requirement to have cable so much if that was all it was. I have cable, but my cable provider does not offer a package with MSNBC so I'm out of luck.
Retric 14y ago
IMO, they can easily give people an online only option and still make more money. 500$ for the entire Olympics seamed to any device for the next 2 years. Bean counters say that's not enough, fine 1000$ or whatever, but there is nothing for NBC to gain from not even having the option. PS: Then again I have cable and I have yet to watch any of the Olympics this year, but I assume some people care.

notJim 14y ago

> They’re doing this for a reason: m-o-n-e-y. Uh, yeah. It's something you need in order to run a company. A company that employs people and gives them, guess what? m-o-n-e-y. And how does it do that, and how does it continue doing that? By being profitable, which it does by having (among other things) exclusive content and advertisers who want to be seen alongside that content. But no, NBC should just put all their stuff online, where it's less clear what kind of profit they would make, because fuck them, this is the internet, and money is bad. We internet people can work at companies that don't have a business model or make a profit, so why can't everyone else?

Dylan16807 14y ago
The point is that they are pursuing short-term profit and sacrificing customer satisfaction. That's a terrible way to run a company.
- Negitivefrags 14y ago
  In order to sacrifice customer satisfaction, there is a requirement that the person be your customer. Not giving something to someone for free just because they demand that they should have it is not sacrificing customer satisfaction.
  - axefrog 14y ago
    Yes but if your product is the viewer and your decisions cause the number of viewers to decrease over time, you're damaging your product, and that will reduce the value of that product to your customers.
    - pbreit 14y ago
      Well, the opening ceremonies had the highest US viewership ever (including against US-based Olympics). Are you sure your contention is accurate? In fact, broadcasting the Olympics is a massive _LONG_ term bet since NBC loses tons of money on the games themselves.
- 14y ago

swanson 14y ago

I can understand a tape delay during the weekdays - hell, I'd even prefer being able to watch at night instead of at 2:30pm EST. But for weekends, it is so stupid. I saw the 400 IM was on at 2:30pm today, so I turned on the tv to NBC - only to see yet another pointless interview with Ryan Seacrest (why is he doing sports coverage??). Had to watch a stream of the race live even though NBC was airing Olypmics coverage at the same time!

emiliobumachar 14y ago

Maybe it's not entirely strategy. I don't know much about web protocols, but I suppose broadcasting a couple dozen live events to millions of people is much easier and cheaper than making recorded events available, which would require sending each of the million viewers an almost unique package in a given instant. Did I assume correctly, or is sending cloned packages not much harder than sending unique ones?

lmm 14y ago
Multicast is pretty much dead, it doesn't go through consumer routers. So unless your library is large enough that storing it becomes an issue, it really doesn't make any difference.

wensing 14y ago

Can't wait for the article 4 years from now complaining about Twitter logjamming fans' real-time Olympic tweets with ads from P&G.

b3b0p 14y ago

I do not see any issue here. They are broadcasting the Olympics when the majority of people can actually sit down and watch them instead of in the early hours of the morning when most of us are sleeping. Some people could probably DVR what they want, but not everybody can (the majority?). I have not looked thoroughly, but from what I have read and seen briefly, NBC is working hard to make it easy to view and access online streams of the individual events if you know what you want to watch. I could be wrong though on actually how easy it truly is. Also, the argument about money. They are a company that is in business to make money. Is this not the one of the main reasons for going in business? To make money. Why would they spend all that money on exclusive access if they were going to lose it all?

bzbarsky 14y ago
> I could be wrong though on actually how easy it truly is. It's impossible, unless you're already an NBC cable subscriber. If you _are_ an NBC subscriber already, it's only pretty painful (involves passwords you basically never use otherwise and so forth). But yes, they're working hard to make it as easy as they can within the "you can't get this if you're not already one of our customers" constraint.....

bluedanieru 14y ago

How about just don't watch the Olympics at all? The IOC is an awful, awful organization.

slowpoke 14y ago
Can't agree more. There are so many reasons to actively boycott the Olympic games, it's plain ridiculous. They should be abolished, as they have nothing to do with sports anymore (did they ever?). It's just one gigantic corporate whorehouse that has ruined pretty much every locality it ever was held at.
- ramblerman 14y ago
  Interesting sentiments, I don't know the IOC but neither of you are providing any reasoning behind your claims. Out of curiosity, why the hate?
  - slowpoke 14y ago
    For a quick insight see this enumeration: http://www.protestlondon2012.com/10reasons.html http://www.protestlondon2012.com/10reasons.html The IOC is deeply corrupt, and the olympics have long ceased to be about sports. They are about selling officially branded merchandise from official sponsors and simultaneously squashing local competition with ridiculous, speciallly drafted laws, which cricitically impacts the local economy even after the games are long over. It's akin to a swarm of locusts, really. Also, the branding police of the IOC puts the MAFIAA to shame - you might have heard about their petty attempts at censorship ("you may not link to our sites if you report negatively about us!!1!1" or banning anyone from using word combinations such as "London 2012" and "Summer Games" - which the internet of course spitefully ignores).
    - cdcarter 14y ago
      > The IOC is deeply corrupt, and the olympics have long ceased to be about sports. They are about selling officially branded merchandise from official sponsors and simultaneously squashing local competition with ridiculous, speciallly drafted laws, which cricitically impacts the local economy even after the games are long over. It's akin to a swarm of locusts, really. Perhaps on the local level this is all true. But (anecdotally, at the very least) for every viewer I know, it's about national competition between incredible athletes. The excitement about seeing a world record broken, the upsets when an up and coming young fencer takes gold, and the warm feeling I get when my flag is raised and the anthem is played. All of your reasons are why it sucks for the host city. That's a problem that can be solved without sacrificing the best athletic competition in the world.

benevpayor 14y ago

I put this on the IOC more than NBC. World sporting organizations like IOC and FIFA (hell, let's throw in the NCAA while we are at it) have sold their souls. It's just plain sad how corrupt and counter to their mission they have become.

swang 14y ago

According to this article from 2011: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2011/06/olympic-tv-decision-between-nbc-espn-and-fox-could-come-down-today/1 http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2011/06/... > In a break with predecessor Dick Ebersol, new NBC Sports chief Mark Lazarus promises to show all events live rather than saving the best for tape-delayed coverage in prime time. So I guess they figured it's not profitable. But I wonder how many people have been pissed at missing the live coverage, see the results on twitter or the rest of the Internet and then just not bothering to tune in during prime-time? How about charging $X to watch it live online? And if you don't want to pay that money then you can just wait until Prime Time.

ddon 14y ago

I don't know how with you guys, but on my iPad all techcrunch links are always create trouble with safari or even with chrome... I will no longer click on TC links :)

nhangen 14y ago

I pay for cable, but to me that isn't the issue here. The issue is that the results of this event were already posted, tweeted, and shared long before the event aired. It was a Saturday, why wouldn't they just show it live and if they wanted to increase nighttime ratings, just show it again? The NBC Olympic coverage sucks.

pbreit 14y ago

I like watching edited, time-delayed, USA-oriented coverage. Am I lame? The BBC thing is neat but quite unwatchable.

pbreit 14y ago

I'm not a big Comcast fan but I have 90 channels plus 30 mbps Internet for $40/month. Seems reasonable to me, maybe even a bargain.