I’m embarrassed, but I admit it. During the Olympics, despite all my cynicism and all the schmaltz, I’m often overpowered by this strange sense of global unity and pride in the triumph of the human form pushed to extremes. It’s because there are occasionally really exciting athletic moments, and there are always sad stories. Like this guy, who was a freaking Lost Boy in Sudan, and was voted by his teammates to carry the American flag during the opening ceremonies. He just wants to inspire other young boys were are struck with the Olympic dream, like he was when he walked five freaking miles from a refugee camp in Kenya to watch the 2000 Sydney games on a black and white TV. If he can reach his dreams, then anyone can have hope in this world. Sniff sniff.
So I was really excited when read that NBC was trying to prove its relevance and get more advertising dollars by putting a lot of content on the web this year, on a site created for the games, www.NBCOlympics.com. I went to the site Friday morning, hoping to catch a glimpse of the opening ceremonies, only to learn that they weren’t to be broadcast until the evening here.
Oh well. What’s really cool about the site is that the events are listed to the left, so you can see when your favorite ones will be broadcast, watch the events live, find out the results if you missed them, and check out replays and special features.
I’ve always been partial to watching lithe, sinewy men in bathing suits, so I tried to check out a replay of the diving finals. Except I can’t. A pop-up asked me to enter my zip code and my television service provider. I don’t have a television, or a provider. So I decided to enter my Internet company instead, since it also provides television services and it’s the closest thing I have. Then, a pop-up informed me that my local provider was not a “partner of NBCOlympics.com,” so I can’t watch live events or long-form replays.
Which, to me, seems the opposite of cool. The problem has never been that the mainstream media is reluctant to put their content on a new platform. That part’s easy. But, apparently, they still aren’t thinking of their content in a new way. Newspapers, magazines, and broadcast television are all lamenting the audiences that flock to the web, taking their advertising pull with them, but they haven’t really been trying to compete.
They try to do the things the web does better – newspapers are blogging and putting shorter and shorter stories up quicker – rather than concentrating on what an unstaffed website could never do – the kind of investigatory journalism that cleans up cities and the long-form story writing that takes people to a new place. They all hired people who could translate their products for the web, but they didn’t hire the Google-like innovators who would make it into something new. And they still haven’t accepted that no one, no one, is really going to pay for classified ads ever again. You’d think they’d all come up with some Craigslist type plan to let users post their own ads on their websites and find a way to link ads of what those people are looking for, giving users control and bringing them to their sites. But no. Instead, they occasionally experiment in charging for content. Guess what? An entire generation is used to content being free.
Which brings me back to how I won’t get to watch the Olympics. I guess NBC imagined that it’s existing customers would want new ways to watch shows, but didn’t think about the customers it doesn’t have. I don’t have a TV, and I don’t want one. I can usually get the shows I like to watch for free online, or pay a small fee to watch them a la carte. It seems to me that that’s the way things are trending. I thought NBC was going there, too. Now I’ll miss iconic moments like this, or this, or this. Sniff sniff. I don’t know how I’ll be inspired this summer. Why does NBC hate freedom?
