Whack a Mole? Whack a PEACOCK!
Love this New York Times article about NBC’s futile attempts to maintain its US broadcast monopoly on the Olympics opening ceremonies.
NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites.
In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.
Also love good-friend-of-the-MCDM Tracy Record’s (from the West Seattle Blog) most excellent comment in said article:
“The idea of watching a 14-hour delay is repulsive.”
She’s absolutely right. And frankly, the opening ceremonies are a major global news event that deserves live coverage. Traditional Mass Media’s (i.e. NBC) attempt to keep the good stuff to itself to maximize advertising revenue is just so 20th century, and hopefully will soon to be a thing of the past.
At least Canada’s CBC gets it (and savvy border-hugging Americans can to if they want true live Olympics coverage). I’m in Toronto right now and watched live coverage this morning, as it should be (I believe NBC was too distracted by its asinine 13th hour of the Today Show to care).
Then again, I just downloaded Silverlight to try and watch NBC’s live online coverage, and was told I couldn’t since I was so obviously not in the United States. And the CBC’s online monopoly here demands that YouTube’s official Olympics channel not be viewable in Canuckistan. Just as big broadcast money corrupts politics, it also corrodes sports.
And we’re criticizing the Chinese for controlling the flow of information Let’s see who’s first to sign the exclusive contract with Father Time for worldwide New Year’s Eve celebrations — to be broadcast in primetime sometime after January 3rd.
Posted by Hanson Hosein (content to be a “former” employee of the NBC/CBC network machines).
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4 Comments, Comment or Ping
Mark
They may also be disturbed to know that I captured the show on DVR….wanted to see it in HD on the TV. It makes that 4 hour juggernaut a lot shorter when you can zip through those annoying commercials. As I’m watching it this morning, I’m cruising event results and clips on the Web. The “whack a mole” just goes on and on.
- Mark
Aug 9th, 2008
Brook Ellingwood
Mark, usually, I’d agree with you about skipping the commercials, but I’m finding the big ad campaigns being trotted out for the Olympics pretty fascinating. There’s an enormous amount of visual creativity being applied to some astoundingly bland concepts. A number of them feature “West meets East” cultural themes that are supposed to create warm and fuzzy “it’s a small world” feelings, but strike me as unintentionally reinforcing a sense of Otherness instead.
Maybe I’m reading it into them, but I see American nervousness about China’s rising economy and global influence clearly reflected in the ads during the Olympics.
Aug 10th, 2008
crackerbelly
Brook,
I have to agree with you. At least some of the advertisements that I have seen today while watching Olympics coverage have been great. Lenovo laptops, an interesting West meets East story in itself, has offered some amusing ads. Also, I have seen a couple of animations by United Airlines that are pretty good. But oops, here we are sharing them online.
Mark
Aug 10th, 2008
hrhmedia
Brook, welcome to FTM (and the MCDM). Good comment about ads, and something I’ve been spouting off about in class as well: that if you want people to pay attention to advertising, it either needs to be unavoidable, or compelling content in its own right. And you’re right, advertising is very much a “sign of the times” — I usually ignore advertising, unless I’m looking at archival media that’s at least 20 years old. Then you get a sense of what the social memes, fears and fads were at the time. Like MTV’s first day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvdphxFBhwQ
As an addendum to my original post, check out the New York Times op-ed, “All of US, the Arbiters of News”: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/business/media/11carr.html (thanks to UW COM Prof. Gina Neff for the link).
“…the mainstream media may bob and weave but surely they know that things have changed and the remote or mouse turns consumers into editors and producers, as well.”
Aug 11th, 2008
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