Wolf Tracking

Dear NBC,

The Summer Olympics is one of the most interesting events I’ve ever witnessed. I actually attended the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal (Bruce Jenner, Nadia Comenici, Sugar Ray Leonard), and was filled with pride and calories during the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, consuming all of that free McDonald’s after the Eastern Bloc countries and Soviet Union boycotted.

Over the past few Olympiads I feel the games on TV have lost their luster. Or maybe it’s something else.

I loved ABC Sports’ continuity. Jim McKay hosted 12 Olympics. I loved how ABC would sift through the 33 different sports and treat me to the best of the best competition every day, mainly because they only had several hours per day to program the Olympics.

CBS actually paid $50,000 for the first televised Olympics in 1960. Several years later, ABC paid nearly $600,000 for the rights to broadcast the 1964 Innsbruck winter games. Fast forward 24 years to 1988 and you saw ABC pay $309 million for the 1988 Calgary games.

More recently, NBC paid $3.5 billion for three games from 2000 to 2008.

But ABC helped me enjoy the Olympics, and here’s why.

It’s true, there was an 800% jump in coverage hours between 1960 and 1992 (link below) and that rise continues, but who has time to even TiVO an average of 27 hours of Olympic coverage each day during the magical two weeks?

The Solution

Here’s what you should do, very simply: Go back to the old ABC model, focusing on only a few hours of the best coverage each day to “broad”cast. Make the rest of the content available via Pay-per-View over the Web, and make whatever you program — both broadcasts and Web-based narrowcasts — INTERACTIVE.

I’ll watch a 10 second clip of the gold-medal winning syncronized swimming team, but there’s no reason to burn the ever-widening digital broadband pipe with live coverage that only 12 people (on a good day) would watch in its entirety, even if you have the pipe to do it.

Use the extra bandwidth to provide me with the crazy interactive services you’ve been promising since the mid-1990s. Show me the best competitions again, like you did during my youth, but modernize my experience. Add in interactive stats that I can pull down in a separate window on my TV screen. Let me order a pizza automatically while watching the Pizza Hut ad. And PLEASE let me connect with other freaks that enjoy the Steeplechase as much as I do.

Please use the technology that the brilliant engineers have worked so hard to provide you by maximizing your bandwidth (less broadcast is more), using interactivity and putting the Internet to good use (narrowcast to the archery freaks)!

There’s no need to broadcast the preliminary Hungary/Lithuania Badminton match, even if it’s on a cable channel. Nobody’s watching.

Thanks!

Greg

Good source: http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/O/htmlO/olympicsand/olympicsand.htm