Thursday, February 25, 2010

More #nbcfail - How connected users avoid NBC Olympic features and advertisers

You may already know how I feel about NBC's Olympic coverage, but allow me to recap.

For viewers in the Pacific time zone, NBC is tape-delaying its coverage of marquee Olympic events so that the events are televised in prime time. Therefore, I will not see any live coverage of the ladies figure skating events.

And because I do not rely on NBC for all of my Olympic coverage, I won't see a lot of tape-delayed coverage either.

In the real world, the ladies figure skating short program began at 4:30 pm Pacific time on Tuesday, February 23. NBC's Los Angeles affiliate did not begin its Olympic coverage until 3 1/2 hours later, at 8:00 pm. And based upon past performance, I knew that NBC was not going to show all thirty competitors in the short program. If I solely relied on NBC, I could watch four hours of Olympic coverage and not see anything of interest.

My primary interest was to see Laura Lepisto's performance, should NBC decide to televise it. Unfortunately for me, Laura Lepisto is not an American, so it was doubtful whether NBC would show it. But I could do some research.

The first thing I needed to find out was when Lepisto would be skating. Thanks to @Sakura0302, I was able to find out.

Group 5 to start at 19:47:30 21 LEPISTO Laura - 22 19:54:00 ASADA Mao - 23 20:00:30 KIM Yu-Na - 24 20:07:00 SUZUKI Akiko - 25 LEONOVA A

So if NBC were to show Lepisto, it would not appear on my Los Angeles TV set until after 10:45 pm.

By 8:00 pm, Lepisto had already skated, I already knew the result (61.36), and now the only question was whether NBC would show her performance. Obviously there were a ton of tweets about Lepisto at the time, but I was searching for tweets (from people on the East Coast) that specifically indicated that Lepisto was televised. And I found two tweets that specifically mentioned NBC analyst Scott Hamilton. One was from @JohannaAP25:

Scott Hamilton thanks for pointing out Laura Lepisto's tucked chin, now that's all I can look at. #OYlmpics

The other was from @shadesoftrue:

I really like Lepisto. She did well. Way to tear her down, Scott.

So, armed with this information, as well as all of the other results of the event, what did I do? I waited to turn the TV on until 10:45 pm, then proceeded to watch Laura Lepisto's routine. Personally, I didn't think that Hamilton was super-critical; critical, yes, but remember who came next. And if you didn't know who came next, right when Lepisto's routine finished, NBC interjected its Asada-Kim featurette, even before Lepisto's scores were televised. I kept the TV on to watch Mao Asada and Kim Yu-Na's performances, then turned the TV off. No offense to Joannie Rochette, but it was getting late.

So all of those companies that paid good money to NBC so that I'd see their ads? I didn't see any of them. Sorry, advertisers, whoever you are, but when you already know the results, why stay around for the ads?
blog comments powered by Disqus