[Infowarrior] - NBCOlympics’ Opening Ceremony Tape Delay: Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

[Richard Forno]

NBCOlympics’ Opening Ceremony Tape Delay: Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

Ryan Lawler
posted 3 hours ago

If you were paying attention to Twitter today, you were probably met with two conflicting sides of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. On the one hand, you had those who were on the ground (or who had access to the live stream somehow — more on that later), and those who were bitching about not being able to watch the ceremony live.

While most of the rest of the world — or at least Europe — was watching the ceremony live, U.S. audiences were held hostage by NBC, which holds the rights to the games here. Rather than broadcasting the biggest event of the Games live as it happened, NBC decided it would air the ceremony on a tape delay, to capture a larger overall audience.

Now, tape delays are nothing new, but they do seem archaic at a time when online video and social media bring an air of immediacy to live events. The existence of the NBC Olympics Twitter account is evidence of this, but the account seems totally misused in this case: NBC live tweeted the whole ceremony, with no apparent sense of irony around the fact that its target audience couldn’t actually watch the events it was describing. Instead of building excitement around the ceremony, and engaging with its viewers, all NBC ended up doing was frustrating its audience — the people who care most about watching the thing.

So really, how bad was NBC’s strategy around the U.S. broadcast of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony in London? So bad that Mark Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, and someone who should really fucking know better, tweeted out a link to a pirated live stream of the ceremony taking place in London. (Ironically enough, he was tweeting about the appearance of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, that magical thing which made the pirate stream available to the rest of us.)

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http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/27/nbc-olympic-opening-ceremony/

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