NBC Will Provide Live Coverage in Some Form for All Olympic Events
(SPORTS TECHNOLOGY)
It has been a long standing tradition that when you are watching an Olympic event, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll already know the outcome. This is because during the Olympics, most of the events are taking place half a world away during a time that most Americans are tucked away in bed. This means that the broadcast network will air the event on tape delay so that there is actually someone awake to watch it.
This year though, NBC has announced that it plans to provide live coverage of every Olympic event. The coverage of that event just might not be on broadcast television. NBC has said that it plans to offer up every event when it happens and in order to do that it may need to simply stream some of those events with very few bells and whistles to accompany it.
This is certainly a departure from the way NBC has covered the Olympics in the past. When Dick Ebersol was running the sports division, he was convinced that allowing there to be any sort of broadcast of the peripheral sports would cut into the network’s overall ratings. Ebersol retired from the network in May of this year and his replacement, Mark Lazarus has a slightly different take on the whole thing. Lazarus told the Associated Press (News - Alert) that he understands that today’s sports fans feel they deserve their sports delivered immediately. While the network will still put together the main broadcasts with all their pomp and circumstances of the big sports, there will be accompanying smaller streaming broadcasts as well.
"You can show things in its rawest form to satisfy that immediacy," Lazarus added, "and then you can package it and make it a bigger story and broader and more inclusive of other elements, and people will watch it again and bring others with them." The streaming of live sports in order to draw a larger audience certainly isn’t brand new. Nor is NBC taking a different view of the Internet than their competitors. How streaming live sporting events on their website or other websites affect the network’s overall ratings remains to be seen and will most likely be closely watched by NBC itself and the other major networks.
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Edited by Rich Steeves
