We’re about a month away from the Paris Olympics and they hype machine is definitely kicking into gear. NBC has steadily improved their Olympics coverage since I railed about it a dozen years ago. I certainly admit that. They’ve largely solved the bandwidth issues that hampered their early streaming attempts, and they’ve created web sites and apps that help you find what you want. A lot of the action will still be on pay-TV and local NBC affiliates, but as before it’s looking like you’ll want Peacock if you really want to immerse yourself in the action.
If you’re like me, you think of the Olympics as this high-minded ideal where it’s all about the purity of sport and coming together as a world and all that. The International Olympic Committee, which oversees the games, calls itself a non-profit. They also say that they’re based in Switzerland. They even go so far as to lay out a lot of their funding sources on their own web site.
Believe me, I’m the last person you want to ask about Swiss banking law, since most of my knowledge about it comes from movies. But I do know that finance law in Switzerland is more opaque than it is in other countries. That doesn’t make the IOC suspect, it also doesn’t not make them suspect.
Either way, the IOC may be non-profit but the games themselves are very specifically for-profit. The games exist to fund the IOC which means their mission is to make a profit. It looks like they get the largest amount of funding from broadcast rights. That’s a pretty sweet deal considering that the host countries bear all the cost of building the stadiums and I presume that means building a lot of the broadcast infrastructure.
So, bottom line is that the Olympics need money. Companies like Comcast, who owns NBC and Peacock, are happy to pay it, because they think you’ll pay them for more coverage and they can sell commercials on broadcast.
That’s the question, of course. Every two years I ask the question and every two years we get some sort of bizarre unconfirmable statistic from Comcast like “people streamed 75 quadrillion hours of Olympics coverage this year.” I have to believe that Comcast wouldn’t be going to this much trouble if they didn’t think people would watch it. They have to believe that it brings subscribers to Peacock, if only for a month or so. As a private company themselves, they don’t have to disclose too much detail there other than what they have to tell stockholders.
I am really glad, though, that Peacock and the NBC Olympics app have so much coverage of the games. Until the 2010s I always complained that the US coverage of the games was incomplete and too focused on Americans. There’s a lot of worldwide drama especially from countries with very small teams who are just glad to be there. We expect the USA to have big medal counts but it’s really nice to see the dedication of those other athletes who simply come to part of the world community. Finally, with these apps you can choose to see virtually the entire experience from trials to bizarre sports like “Sport Climbing” and whatever “Rugby Sevens” are.
In the end, I’ll be watching this sort of coverage and largely ignoring the big US-centric events that everyone talks about. I hope you give them a look as well.
The Olympics start July 24 on Comcast-owned stations like NBC and USA, on DIRECTV’s 4K Channels, as well as on the Peacock app.
The post STREAMING SATURDAY: Will NBC’s Olympic gamble pay off this time? appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.
Continue reading...
A reminder that the Olympics are also there to make money
If you’re like me, you think of the Olympics as this high-minded ideal where it’s all about the purity of sport and coming together as a world and all that. The International Olympic Committee, which oversees the games, calls itself a non-profit. They also say that they’re based in Switzerland. They even go so far as to lay out a lot of their funding sources on their own web site.
Believe me, I’m the last person you want to ask about Swiss banking law, since most of my knowledge about it comes from movies. But I do know that finance law in Switzerland is more opaque than it is in other countries. That doesn’t make the IOC suspect, it also doesn’t not make them suspect.
Either way, the IOC may be non-profit but the games themselves are very specifically for-profit. The games exist to fund the IOC which means their mission is to make a profit. It looks like they get the largest amount of funding from broadcast rights. That’s a pretty sweet deal considering that the host countries bear all the cost of building the stadiums and I presume that means building a lot of the broadcast infrastructure.
So, bottom line is that the Olympics need money. Companies like Comcast, who owns NBC and Peacock, are happy to pay it, because they think you’ll pay them for more coverage and they can sell commercials on broadcast.
Will you (or anyone) be watching?
That’s the question, of course. Every two years I ask the question and every two years we get some sort of bizarre unconfirmable statistic from Comcast like “people streamed 75 quadrillion hours of Olympics coverage this year.” I have to believe that Comcast wouldn’t be going to this much trouble if they didn’t think people would watch it. They have to believe that it brings subscribers to Peacock, if only for a month or so. As a private company themselves, they don’t have to disclose too much detail there other than what they have to tell stockholders.
I am really glad, though, that Peacock and the NBC Olympics app have so much coverage of the games. Until the 2010s I always complained that the US coverage of the games was incomplete and too focused on Americans. There’s a lot of worldwide drama especially from countries with very small teams who are just glad to be there. We expect the USA to have big medal counts but it’s really nice to see the dedication of those other athletes who simply come to part of the world community. Finally, with these apps you can choose to see virtually the entire experience from trials to bizarre sports like “Sport Climbing” and whatever “Rugby Sevens” are.
In the end, I’ll be watching this sort of coverage and largely ignoring the big US-centric events that everyone talks about. I hope you give them a look as well.
The Olympics start July 24 on Comcast-owned stations like NBC and USA, on DIRECTV’s 4K Channels, as well as on the Peacock app.
The post STREAMING SATURDAY: Will NBC’s Olympic gamble pay off this time? appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.
Continue reading...
