Who’d have thunk the Conan O’Brien versus Jay Leno debacle was just a precursor?
NBC is having a very bad start to 2010.
A month after the fourth-place network went through a public relations nightmare with its late-night line-up, NBC once again finds itself in the midst of a firestorm, this time due to its lackluster coverage of the Winter Olympics.
The network paid $820 million for the right to broadcast the Vancouver games, a 37 percent increase over the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino. Factor in the cost it takes to produce the games — from cameramen, producers, reporters and multiple top shelf hosts — NBC figures to lose $250 million.
Losing money for the right to broadcast sports is nothing new. Networks have been doing it with the Super Bowl and other marquee events for ages. It’s what’s known as the halo effect. The network can shamelessly promote other, more-profitable shows (See: the horrible concept of The Marriage Ref, the always awful Celebrity Apprentice and the could-be-decent Parenthood), which in the end will result in more viewership and eventual profits for the network.
Where NBC went wrong this time around was just how far it was willing to go to save a buck, ultimately destroying everything we enjoy about watching the Olympics.
These Olympics, located in the Pacific Time Zone, are primed for a U.S. television audience. NBC apparently thinks the West coast of North America, which includes the country’s most populous state, California, is a foreign land on the other side of the world. Nearly every event has been tape delayed, some airing on NBC in prime-time several hours after the results have been posted on every sports website, Twitter and Facebook feed known to exist. With the results known, the reason most of us watch sports — for the drama and unscripted outcome — is gone.
Factor in other cost-cutting measures: cutting streaming video of events online from 61 percent or 2,200 hours of the events in Beijing just two years ago, to 48 percent or 400 hours in Vancouver.
The network has devoted seamlessly countless hours to curling, while intense and dramatic sports like hockey, downhill skiing and the bobsled/luge/skeleton events have been relegated to tight, edited packages where only a handful of the competitors are shown.
Media critics and non-media critics alike have blasted NBC the last two weeks, while the Twitter tag #NBCfail has been a trending topic for days.
The mismanagement of NBC time-slots and resources is nothing new. What few regular viewers NBC has left, even those who usually don’t notice these things, have likely felt scorned by the networks Olympic coverage.
It’s unfortunate. Until recently, I’ve always felt NBC was far undervalued. While NBC has made plenty of stupid decisions (example: Leno in prime-time), the network has an eye for quality programing (see: Friday Night Lights, Chuck, The Office — and for the former two, even created innovative ways to keep those shows on the air.) NBC can once again be proud of its “Must See TV” Thursday night line-up and has found a diamond in the stand-up-comic rough with Jimmy Fallon, who has grown tremendously into his role as host of Late Night.
But as the late-night war forewarned, and the Olympics have proved, NBC is horribly mismanaged and will do anything to save a buck, even scorn its loyal viewers and destroy the mystique of one of the world’s premier events.
Through the controversies the network has seen increased ratings; all news is good news, right? Not quite. While NBC may be netting more eyeballs in the short-term, it is damaging its brand and inflicting long-term damage on an already crippled product.