It's Time to Put These Olympics Behind Us (As Far As Web Coverage Goes)
With the 2010 Winter Olympics wrapping up this weekend in Vancouver, I hope we can put the past behind us. That is, the past of crappy U.S. online coverage of a major global sporting event, with the key offender being exclusive distributor NBC.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks into the Vancouver Games, the web-commentary consensus has hardened against how NBC handled its exclusive U.S. digital rights: the network's online offering was widely panned as restricted and heavily tape-delayed, a frustration TechCrunch's guide to following the Olympics online had already cataloged at the opening ceremony. The critique now has political legs — an Associated Press pickup reports a Wisconsin senator criticizing NBC's handling of online access.
The complaint fits a pattern the corpus keeps circling: NBC's corporate upheaval has kept the divide between its television and web strategies in focus since late 2009, and the network has a history of treating live moments defensively, from holding Tim Russert's death off-air to letting its own SNL clips drift to YouTube despite the Hulu joint venture.
First-order effects
- U.S. viewers who wanted live online video were funneled through NBC's gated, delay-heavy presentation, while the senator's criticism gives the complaints a formal, public forum beyond blog grumbling.
- NBC exits the Games with its exclusivity model publicly discredited among the tech press it most needs to court for future distribution.
Second-order effects
- Real-time social platforms sharpen the damage: with results circulating instantly, NBC is already credited with moving the August Emmys live for the first time because of Twitter, and rumors say it may drop the West Coast delay too — the same logic applies directly to Olympic-style event coverage.
- Rights-holding broadcasters abroad face comparison pressure to offer fuller streaming packages, setting a benchmark NBC's rivals can market against when the next Games are auctioned.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, exclusive national rights deals will be priced and policed not just by advertisers but by politicians and viewers demanding live digital access — turning streaming completeness from a bonus into a condition of the franchise.
- Event broadcasting structurally shifts toward the platform layer: whoever operates the streams, apps, and social distribution accrues value regardless of which network holds the traditional TV rights.
The trend: Major-event rights holders are being pushed from tape-delayed, gatekept web coverage toward live streaming as social media collapses the delay that exclusivity once protected.