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Maybe I am young at heart

August 22, 2016

The New York Times’ Quentin Hardy (@qhardy) reports that people, especially in the 18 to 34 age group, increasingly want to see live events such as the Olympics as they happen, whether on televison or a mobile device.

Though NBC offered coverage of the RIO Olympics on its NBC Sports App, NBC delayed the broadcast of some events to show them during prime time, sacrificing immediacy in the hopes of a larger viewing audience.

Per Hardy:

…[I]n a world where seeing things in real time and commenting on them is a big value for the young, that kind of time delay may alienate the coveted crowd. NBC was unable to deliver its advertisers the kind of audiences seen during the 2012 London Olympics, and as a result, NBC had to give advertisers free airtime to make up for the shortfall.

Exactly. I would have loved to watch the Olympics, especially the track and field events. But I would no longer put up with the baloney of watching delayed coverage of events which NBC packaged on televison around ads and random interviews and on its confusing app, which packaged track events so it would have taken me an hour or two to wait for the men’s 1,500.

I don’t think I watched 30 minutes of the Olympics and came to believe that this extraordinary event would sadly become irrelevant, as far as I was concerned.

I get that I am being too demanding of NBC’s current management, but that’s just what I have come to expect after using the Internet for all I do — and consume. For people 30 and 40 years younger than me, it’s all they know. NBC is kissing them goodbye.

If NBC told me I could buy a subscription to the Olympics on an app for $50 per week (total of $100 to $150) and I saw with people sharing coverage of the events on social media how exciting things were, I probably would have bought it.

I pay a subscription to the New York Times because the stories come as written, their iPhone and iPad app is outstanding, their reporters are active on social media and the content is widely shareable on social media.

NBC’s and the IOC’s trying to go old school, even clamping down on social media sharing of coverage, reminds me of when the legal directory, Martindale-Hubbell (remember it?), didn’t want Google to index their directory because that would change Martindale’s business model.