NBC had to fight hard against something it probably didn’t see coming.  People in the US were upset to learn that NBC would delay the coverage of the opening ceremonies by up to 12 hours to put it in a better time-slot for American viewers.  Angry viewers who wanted to watch it live like the rest of the world, used various methods to side-step the network, and NBC wasn’t happy about it.

According to the New York Times, people used news-feeds on foreign broadcasters’ web sites and clips on YouTube and other video-sharing sites to access the live coverage.  NBC spent most of Friday trying to contact all of the aforementioned sources to try and persuade them to take down their feeds, and respect the licensing agreements that are in place.  

The problem was made worse when different links to coverage were circulating the blogosphere and Twitter as fast as NBC could have them taken down.  YouTube even had a hard time fielding all the requests to take down videos, as they were being uploaded at a steady pace during the entire opening ceremony.  It shows that Olympic coverage from here on out is a whole different story.  This year’s coverage is the first of its kind in this so-called “digital age,” and NBC obviously wasn’t prepared to handle the load.

“The Olympics to me is a benchmark for how fast we’ve gone with technology,” Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm in New York, said. “Thirty months ago, no one was talking about YouTube. Now, it’s a verb.”  Only two years ago, during the Winter Olympics, NBC only broadcast two hours of live coverage on the internet.  This year, in contrast, they’ve vowed to stream over 2,200 hours over several different internet feeds.

Almost all of the world’s other broadcasters who bought rights to the Olympics, including CBC in Canada, Televisa in Mexico, the BBC in Britain and NHK in Japan, broadcast the opening ceremonies live on television like it should have been. “The idea of watching a 14-hour delay is repulsive,” remarked Tracy Record, a blogger in Seattle, who woke up at 5 a.m. to watch the opening ceremonies with her 12-year-old son on CBC. 

When you think about it, the only reason NBC did such a delay was to appease American advertisers and garner higher ratings, which is understandable.  But, shouldn’t NBC have known the backlash they were going to receive in response to such a move?

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Entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 7:28 pm under Online video.

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.
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