The Olympic Broadcast Model is Doomed
Like many of us, I’ve been watching a lot of the Olympics this week. I love following sports I’m into (cycling, track & field, triathlon) and those I’m not (table tennis, swimming, volleyball). When the stakes are this high, and the athletes this good, the Games are almost always exciting.
However, I’ve also been paying attention to the NBC broadcast, and there are many problems with it. In fact, the viewing experience is terrible. Here’s what I’m seeing:
1. Ratings are tanking. NBC has clung to the old school prime time broadcast model, invented in the 1950s. The problem is that the world has moved on, but NBC has not. For context, here’s what’s going on in the U.S. with cord cutting and cable TV viewing:
This graphic lays it out clearly. In particular, look at the 18–49 demographics that TV advertisers covet: their time spent watching pay TV is down between 55% and 81% over the last 10 years. So where does that leave the Olympics? Without the viewers most important to its advertisers. This is all common knowledge, and everyone at NBC knows these stats. What is baffling to me is that they did not build a stand-alone, on-demand streaming plan. Sure, you can go to NBCOlympics.com and find lots of live events and stream them, BUT ONLY IF YOU HAVE A CABLE ACCOUNT. And NBC’s new Peacock streaming platform is only showing a daily highlight show along with selected live events. So I wonder, is anyone under 35 even watching the Olympics? And, if it looks like this now, how will it look in 2024 and 2028, not to mention at the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year? NBC is not only failing to meet their customers where they are, they’re missing the chance to build new generations of fans. We’re seeing the Olympics slide into irrelevance.
2. The broadcast is 2D and not 3D. NBC has optimized their viewing experience for prime time TV. That means watching in your living room on a big screen. And yet, in 2021 NBC could create a much richer experience. When I say “3D” I don’t mean the kind where you put on glasses to watch. I’m talking about providing context and depth to the broadcast with all kinds of supporting information. Here’s a screenshot of my computer watching women’s triathlon a couple days ago:
What if I want to see where another athlete is in the middle of the pack? Where’s the constantly updated sidebar with everyone’s place? What if I want to learn more about Flora Duffy? Why couldn’t they have a list of all the competitors over on the right? Why can’t I see each athlete’s bike and swim split times? For comparison, when I watch bike races on GCN or FloBikes (both of which also just put up 2D live feeds), I keep two separate tabs open: ProCyclingStats and Twitter. The PCS live feed provides up-to-the minute data on the race and the athletes, while Twitter allows me to monitor (with hashtags) the global conversation around the event. NBC could easily build in these kind of features, even just using the Twitter API to create a widget for each event landing page.
Today’s viewer has spent 10 years scrolling through social media, buying things on Amazon and watching entertainment on Netflix. We’ve come to expect great UI that solves problems for us. NBC’s online experience takes us back 10–15 years and doesn’t even try to keep up with current trends. That’s a huge mistake, and they’ll lose more and more viewers in each successive Olympics.
Here are some examples of high quality live sports experiences I use:
3. The announcers are hit-and-miss. I’m not sure why NBC can’t get consistently good announcing teams at the world’s largest sporting event. There are some good people commentating, like Barton Lynch and Sal Masakela in surfing. And the prime time sports like swimming, gymnastics and track get good teams. But most other sports are left to mediocre announcers. On the MTB broadcasts, for instance, Rochelle Gilmore was the color commentator. While I have great respect for her as a highly decorated Australian road cyclist in the 2000s, she was way out of her depth talking about MTB in 2021. She gave us no new information, no nuance, and no background story on the athletes. The announcing team is critical to the appeal of a live sports broadcast. With sub-par teams on many of the events, NBC is telling us that anything outside of prime time is just an afterthought and an annoyance.
I’ll still watch the Olympics, but I’ll spend less and less time doing so in the future. There are better ways to spend my time than trying to follow mediocre broadcast experiences.
