Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

Despite how many people on this site and sites like it don't have some kind of cable or satellite service... we're a pretty small minority. <i>Especially</i> when it comes to the group of people interested in watching sports, where live is king, and the online options <i>suck</i> unless you live out of your teams' TV markets. I'm not surprised they're not going out of their way to cater to us.<p>For all the "the model no longer works" comments: what's the proof? The number of people I know complaining about the model is dwarfed by the number of people I know who have cable and have been watching stuff on both TV and online all day long.<p>I've seen a lot of legitimate complaints about how they're handling the time shifting stuff (which, surprisingly to me, has mostly been along the lines of "it's too easy to find out what happened" instead of complaining about the time shifting in the first place), but I don't see a big hole in their delivery system. They don't want to give people less reason to have cable -- and for all the money they could possibly make broadcasting the Olympics for-pay to non-cable subscribers, that's just a couple weeks every couple of years. The real win for them is if you still want to maintain a cable subscription.

&#62; They’re doing this for a reason: m-o-n-e-y.<p>Uh, yeah. It's something you need in order to run a company. A company that employs people and gives them, guess what? m-o-n-e-y. And how does it do that, and how does it continue doing that? By being profitable, which it does by having (among other things) exclusive content and advertisers who want to be seen alongside that content.<p>But no, NBC should just put all their stuff online, where it's less clear what kind of profit they would make, because fuck them, this is the internet, and money is bad. We internet people can work at companies that don't have a business model or make a profit, so why can't everyone else?

Just a thought- NBC is a for-profit company. Because of that they are able to pay hundreds of millions for the rights to cover the Olympics. Because of that, they want the largest viewership. That occurs during primetime. If the tv industry is so "disruptable" as many keep saying, why hasn't it happened? Clearly people want the ability to watch as much shit, wherever, whenever they can, preferably for free. Apparently the problem is that unlike most internet sites, television requires an actual business model.<p>The fact that this guy is literally asking people on an internet blog not to watch what will inevitably be viewed by tens of millions of people kind of does more to prove this point than anything I can say here could.

I understand the frustration, but NBC is just trying to optimize for primetime viewers so they can extract maximum advertising dollars. They paid over $1 billion dollars for the right to broadcast the Olympics and now they must recoup that investment.

Between NBC's behavior (and I'm recalling the unwatchability of the winter [CENSORED] two years ago, as well), the branding bullshit (including special, specific protective legislation), the outsourcing and outsourcing fiascos, and several other things I've already managed to consciously forget, I've already made my decision. I will not seek out one second of coverage.<p>Sportsmanship left the venue, if not always the specific athletes, a long time ago.

This coming from TechCrunch? I ended up turning on NBC (because the enemy of my enemy must be my friend).

Like many people here I would like to believe that the state of the world that ensures the highest profits and the state of the world that makes the most people happy are one and the same. I am coming to think that isn't true.

Apparently the results of today's 400M Men's swimming individual medley were the lede for NBC Nightly News tonight... before NBC has even aired the race. Just when you thought they couldn't make things worse....

I can understand a tape delay during the weekdays - hell, I'd even prefer being able to watch at night instead of at 2:30pm EST. But for weekends, it is so stupid.<p>I saw the 400 IM was on at 2:30pm today, so I turned on the tv to NBC - only to see yet another pointless interview with Ryan Seacrest (why is he doing sports coverage??). Had to watch a stream of the race live even though NBC was airing Olypmics coverage at the same time!

I do not see any issue here. They are broadcasting the Olympics when the majority of people can actually sit down and watch them instead of in the early hours of the morning when most of us are sleeping. Some people could probably DVR what they want, but not everybody can (the majority?).<p>I have not looked thoroughly, but from what I have read and seen briefly, NBC is working hard to make it easy to view and access online streams of the individual events if you know what you want to watch. I could be wrong though on actually how easy it truly is.<p>Also, the argument about money. They are a company that is in business to make money. Is this not the one of the main reasons for going in business? To make money. Why would they spend all that money on exclusive access if they were going to lose it all?

According to this article from 2011: <a href="http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2011/06/olympic-tv-decision-between-nbc-espn-and-fox-could-come-down-today/1" rel="nofollow">http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2011/06/...</a><p>&#62; In a break with predecessor Dick Ebersol, new NBC Sports chief Mark Lazarus promises to show all events live rather than saving the best for tape-delayed coverage in prime time.<p>So I guess they figured it's not profitable. But I wonder how many people have been pissed at missing the live coverage, see the results on twitter or the rest of the Internet and then just not bothering to tune in during prime-time?<p>How about charging $X to watch it live online? And if you don't want to pay that money then you can just wait until Prime Time.

I put this on the IOC more than NBC. World sporting organizations like IOC and FIFA (hell, let's throw in the NCAA while we are at it) have sold their souls. It's just plain sad how corrupt and counter to their mission they have become.

I miss journalism. How is this a monopoly? Just because I buy a meal doesn't mean I have a monopoly over eating. Can we now construct arguments with cuss words?

Maybe it's not entirely strategy. I don't know much about web protocols, but I suppose broadcasting a couple dozen live events to millions of people is much easier and cheaper than making recorded events available, which would require sending each of the million viewers an almost unique package in a given instant. Did I assume correctly, or is sending cloned packages not much harder than sending unique ones?

Well, it's not like I own a television set anyway.

I pay for cable, but to me that isn't the issue here. The issue is that the results of this event were already posted, tweeted, and shared long before the event aired. It was a Saturday, why wouldn't they just show it live and if they wanted to increase nighttime ratings, just show it again?<p>The NBC Olympic coverage sucks.

Is it purely NBC's fault or the notoriously corrupt IOC's fault?

I don't know how with you guys, but on my iPad all techcrunch links are always create trouble with safari or even with chrome... I will no longer click on TC links :)

Can't wait for the article 4 years from now complaining about Twitter logjamming fans' real-time Olympic tweets with ads from P&#38;G.

I'm not a big Comcast fan but I have 90 channels plus 30 mbps Internet for $40/month. Seems reasonable to me, maybe even a bargain.

I like watching edited, time-delayed, USA-oriented coverage. Am I lame?<p>The BBC thing is neat but quite unwatchable.

How about just don't watch the Olympics at all? The IOC is an awful, awful organization.