NBC Bringing Different View to Olympics

In the United States, we are used to see our sporting events the second they happen, save for a possible delay of a few beats to make sure no naughty words seep through.

But every two years, as is happening now with the Vancouver Games, the nation gets to play the "Are the Olympics live or aren't they?" game with NBC in the role of the not always so forthcoming a host.

Since NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol took over the production of the Olympics with the Barcelona Summer Games in 1992, the network has occasionally played television footsy with the concept of showing events simultaneously with when they actually took place.

Maybe that figure skating is happening now, maybe it's not. Perhaps those cross-country skiers are schlepping across the mountainous terrain the second you're seeing it or perhaps it happened hours ago. You don't often know, and NBC won't always tell you. I'll take "Confusion and Obfuscation for $1,000, Alex."

The phrase which governs this approach "plausibly live" was first advanced by Terry O'Neil, who produced those Games with Ebersol, and who, like Ebersol, learned production at the foot of the master, former ABC Sports and News President Roone Arledge, the father of sports storytelling.
"Viewers want to be transported to the events," O'Neil said to the New York Times 18 years ago. "They don't want a summary of the shots when an American wins a silver. They want to live out the live drama ... Will it feel live to them? Yeah, it's designed to. If they want to suspend belief, that's what we want."

In some cases, that belief doesn't have to be suspended so much. The time of day that appears in the background should make it clear to the viewer when something is/was happening.

For instance, it was obvious that the men's downhill ski competition that aired in prime time Monday had taken place earlier in the day.

NBC's approach, however, makes speculation about the degree to which coverage is massaged to make for great television, a la inserting interviews and features into competition to the exclusion of seemingly extraneous athletes whose participation don't make for good drama.

To the network's credit, the "live" bug appears more frequently now in the upper right hand corner of the screen than it did, say, during the Atlanta or Athens Summer Games or the Salt Lake City Winter Games.

But the fact that NBC even has to post notification that something is live speaks volumes about how the network perceives the Olympics.

What NBC is gambling on is the idea that, for the home audience, the Olympics are a different viewing experience than watching, say, the NFL playoffs or the NCAA Tournament, and that the drama of competition needs to be fortified, if you will, with television production and "storytelling."

For instance, how much grief would CBS have taken last week if after Tracy Porter ran back a Peyton Manning interception during the Super Bowl, if the network had paused to air a feature on Porter's hometown. Sure, it might have been interesting, but it would also have been inappropriate for that moment.

Yet, in-between showing downhill skiing and snowcross, NBC aired a four-minute Mary Carillo feature on polar bears living near a Manitoba lake during Monday's prime time. It was fascinating television, to be sure, but better suited for the National Geographic Channel than in the middle of athletic competition.

Of greater significance, especially to viewers in the Pacific and Mountain time zones, is how much after events happen they are seeing them.

That's because NBC is tape delaying prime time coverage in the two most western time zones in the contiguous United States, despite the fact that Vancouver is in the same time zone as California, Oregon and Washington.

NBC's rationale for holding the telecasts until 8 p.m. in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle and 7 p.m. in Boise, Phoenix and Denver is similar to the reason that events such as the NCAA men's basketball championship game and NBA Finals games all start around 9 p.m. ET.

Namely, the network wants as many of the 50 million potential viewers who live in the west at home in front of their television sets as opposed to on their way home from work.

Ebersol said two years ago, when the network employed the same strategy for Beijing, that network research indicated that western viewers wanted to watch the Games at their convenience and didn't want to miss important events because they were at work or heading home from same.

Said Ebersol then: "And you know what? Strangely enough, in every Olympics that I have done, going back to 1992, every Olympics, the audience on the West Coast over-indexes against all the other regions in the United States. They love sports so much, and they know when they want to watch it, and that's in primetime."

Ratings from the first two days of coverage seem to bear Ebersol out. Nielsen figures from Friday and Saturday indicate that ratings from the Mountain (19.9 rating/35 share) and Pacific (17.8/34) were higher than those from the Central (17.3/29) and Eastern (17.2/28).

There's another reason for NBC's holding prime time for western viewers and it's a lot less noble.

The network's rights agreement with the International Olympic Committee gives NBC a near hegemony over when highlights can be shown by other entities, and, as you might expect, NBC is maximizing its advantage to the fullest.

NBC has control of all of that day's Olympic footage until it airs it, which explains why the events that are deemed to have the widest interest don't get shown until prime time.

A local station is only permitted to show a maximum of two minutes of Olympic highlights per newscast for a total of six minutes per day. Those highlights can only be aired once within a 24-hour window, but only after NBC shows the event first.

As an example, Bode Miller's bronze medal winning run Monday can now only air on competing outlets Tuesday -- a full day after its prime value, and not again after Tuesday.

(By the way, ESPN received some highlight concessions from NBC four years ago, when it permitted Al Michaels to leave ABC to do play-by-play on Sunday Night Football.)

Thus, the western tape delay is vital. If the network aired footage simultaneously in all time zones, which would mean leaving the airwaves at 8 or 9 p.m. in the Mountain and Pacific zones, there's a decent chance that a viewer in Los Angeles or Phoenix could see significant highlights during the late local news that night on a competing station. This way, they can only see them on NBC until the next day.

It's certainly not the way most sporting events are presented, but then, any connection between the Olympics and a sporting event -- at least in the manner NBC presents it -- is strictly accidental.