Twitter & Facebook are killing delays of live shows such as the Emmys
Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are changing the way we communicate in a very real sense. And now they’re even messing with the well-established practices of U.S. television networks. That’s right folks, they’re messing with the delay of live events as people immediately head online to talk about what they just saw on the goggle box.
It must be strange living in a country with different time zones. Being British, I’ve never experienced such a thing, but in the States it affects a number of different facets of modern life. One of which is TV, with primetime taking place at different times depending on where you live in the country.
This is fine for the majority of shows, which aren’t really affected by being broadcast at different times. But live events, especially sports and award shows, are directly affected by timezone differences.
The policy of most U.S. networks has so far been to delay broadcast in the Western time zones until primetime hits that part of the country. So those resident in Eastern and Central will get to see live events actually live as they happen. The poor suckers in the Mountain and Pacific regions have to wait two or three hours to see that exact same event happen on a delay.
The advent of the Web, and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook especially, has affected these plans one way or another. The most obvious effect is that most people, wherever they live in the U.S., know the results of these shows as soon as they’re announced. It just happens that those in the west of the country read about them online rather than seeing them occur live on their televisions.
According to Broadcasting and Cable, this has led NBC to plan to broadcast the Emmys live coast-to-coast for the first time ever later this year. The Golden Globes has already received the same treatment.
There is a spanner in the works though. Which is that ratings for the Grammys were up 35 percent this year on last. And they were subject to a tape delay on CBS. The assumption is that more people actually tuned in after hearing about certain points of the show from the same Web sites as are being blamed for leaking the winners.
I think the delay should be scrapped wholesale. People will then tune in to the shows they want to, and if anything noteworthy occurs then those who didn’t watch will likely catch up using online video sites anyway. Everyone’s a winner.
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