“Imagine you’d been able to watch this year’s Olympic Games on your television without having to rely on NBC’s much-criticized coverage,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“That’s the sort of future you can look forward to on release of the Apple television when it comes, or when you use some connected television sets and set-top boxes,” Evans writes. “Over 40 percent of Americans are live-streaming Olympics coverage on their smartphones and tablets. Already one-third of Europeans are streaming TV shows over the Internet, up by 10 percent on 2011.”
Evans writes, “For example, a BBC app could be made available for free to US viewers, offering some free content but making a much wider catalog of content available for a monthly fee. Such a plan would fit well with the BBC’s stated mission to make more money from international sales of its content. In theory at least it would also have meant US Olympics fans would have been able to watch the opening ceremony in real time, rather than being forced to use NBC.”
Much more in the full article here.
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Wouldn’t watching stuff, live streaming, for free, eventually end up about as interesting as watching that (American) football game they broadcast way back when without any commentators?
God, I yearn for the day when the networks dump all those extraneous and unnecessary talking heads, especially that overpaid vocabulary-challenged Tony Siracusa. i watch games with the sound muted except when there’s a penalty. I don’t need five people wearing suits and ties all telling me what’s going on, what ought to happen next, and why the last play was so terrific/horrible.
I was in Asia in 1998, during the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. I remember watching some of the coverage on the Japanese network NHK. My recollection was that their coverage was much better than what I was used to in the USA. Also, that I understood not a word from the announcers may have had something to with it.
Yeah… That would be cool, too bad it wont happen in our lifetime. The hold traditional media outlets have on distribution is not going to change anytime soon. Sorry ;(
NBC – No Bloody Chance. Rubbish coverage.
It will never happen. Content creators cost money. Until you decide that you want to work for free, nobody else is going to either.
Sorry USA… You guys have been getting screwed by NBC. The BBC were not broadcasting the beach volleyball final on thier normal TV channels tonight so I just used the BBC app to push the live Internet feed onto my TV via AppleTV – flawless.
As for the comment above about it being uninteresting – the BBC do in fact have commentators for each and every broadcast, Internet streams included – so it is actually pretty awesome and a fantastic service. One day you guys will catch up…
Free, or advertising in your face, in “real time.” Just look at this page- imagine it as a TV screen.
Watch other coverage then…like British or Canadian. CTV or TSN is better anyway IMO.
i seriously doubt that 40% of americans are live-streaming the olympics on their smart phones and tablets. that would mean that practically everyone over the age of 15 has a smart phone or tablet and is streaming it.
With my cable provider it costs €12/mo to watch TV all day on my settop box. This doesn’t include the €50/mo for internet connectivity (at 20Mb/s).
For all practical purposes, one month contains no more than 18h/day * 30days=540 viewing hours.
So average viewing cost is €12/540 per hour. That’s 2c/hour!
My point is the following: charging several dollars per hour for viewing TV shows is disproportionately hence prohibitively expensive.
Just imagine you would watch streaming TV at €2/h, that would mean 2*540€/month. RIDICULOUS!!!!
As long as prices don’t go down *drastically*, streaming TV is never to pick up with the masses.
I never understood why NBC didn’t offer two ‘prime times’ to their advertisers. One for the live Olympic times and one for normal prime dinner time. Surely it would bring in even more revenue.
The author obviously doesn’t understand broadcast rights, and specifically Olympic rights. If the BBC made anything available to anyone outside the area where they have rights, they would be in violation and immediately sued by the IOC.
The larger point of future viewing and specifically international events like the Olympics can be completely transformed still holds true, just not in the example he gave.
This.
Exclusive broadcasting rights for international events will continue to be carved up on a per-teritory basis. There’s just more money to be made that way. An international license to broadcast to the world would be prohibitively expensive.
The BBC has an incredibly limited budget compared to commercial broadcasters, so will never be able to compete.
As a Brit living in the States, watching the Olympics on NBC was always frustrating. At the beginning on this Olympics they were going to televise a Team GB soccer game but then a US competitor got into the Archery final. So without any indication they switch to the Archery final.
Fortunately almost all the feeds are now available for streaming via the cable / NBC / YouTube. After that I was able to watch whatever events I liked and at any time.
The best was Saturday afternoon, where I watched a soccer game, the hepthalon final event, the long jump final and the 10000 meters all in the space of a few hours.
I had 4 streams going at once and could switch to full screen for whatever event was coming to the climax.
Watching Britain win 3 Gold Athletic medals in an hour more than made up for losing the soccer match.
This is the future of TV. Ultimate choice and no dumb commentary.
Team GB have been awesome.
Devil’s in the details. I seriously doubt that 40% figure represents the total audience or the total viewing time. During the first few days, NBC’s Olympic site displayed real-time viewership numbers for all of their online video feeds. The men’s gymnastics finals had about 50k online viewers. I did a quick tally of the video viewing numbers and it came out to less than 150k. Yeah, if you include everybody that might have logged on at any given time, then those numbers would like increase.
But, consider that NBC’s primetime coverage averages more than 30 million viewers (that’s averaged out over the entire duration of the broadcast, so it’s a comparable number), and their live daytime coverage on NBCSN alone has averaged more than 7 million viewers at any given time. For all the hype that the Olympic online video gets on tech blogs, the actual viewing numbers and viewing time still lag way behind the broadcast coverage.
An Apple HDTV with streaming connectivity still won’t get around the simple fact that NBC paid a hefty figure for the Olympic broadcast rights, and they’re not going to willingly relinquish the revenue streams that they currently squeeze out of those broadcasts.
NBC made the decision after the 1988 Seoul games (80% of their coverage that year was live, but the ratings were a huge drop from the 1984 Los Angeles games) that the Olympics were about “storytelling” and so their primetime coverage is now packaged and edited like a scripted drama. I think that makes for horrific viewing, but until viewers start tuning out in droves, NBC’s not going to change that approach. And the ratings for the London games have been huge, so it any major changes to NBC’s coverage won’t happen anytime soon, especially since they just dropped $4.3 billion for the broadcast rights through 2020. Bummer that we won’t see how a different broadcast network like ABC/ESPN or Fox would breathe new life into the Olympic coverage.