Shortly
after NASA's Curiosity Rover landed on Mars and began beaming back its initial
images, a graphic popped up on social networks lampooning NBC's
Olympic coverage. It showed the Earth and Mars with two captions: "NBC:
six hour delay for an event 3,500 miles away. NASA: 14 minute delay for an
event 155,000,000 miles away."
If
nothing else, it was a pithy reminder of how business models artificially
constrain what our technology is capable of. It was also a reminder of the
flack NBC caught for how it handled the broadcasting of the games.
The
company was mercilessly lampooned for its decision to
replay live events long after the outcomes had been widely broadcast online. It
also sought - unsuccessfully - to button up all online viewing in the
U.S. to its own stream, offering a "free" stream to anyone who
authenticated their subscription to a pay TV service. Commentators pointed out
that as a broadcast channel that is obligated by law to offer free broadcasts,
this policy was an affront. It didn't help matters that the stream itself faltered at several key events - something that
will no doubt give over-the-top providers heartburn.
The
streaming wasn't the only debacle.
Twitter,
too, suffered its share of black eyes. The London Olympics were to serve as a
kind of coming out party for "social TV" - where users could tweet
out their reactions to events as they watched them. Yet one day before the
opening ceremony, Twitter crashed. Then after the first day of the
Olympics, the organizers sheepishly asked attendees to only Tweet "in an
emergency" because broadcasters were complaining that all the Tweets were clogging network bandwidth.
Finally,
Twitter caught huge flack for (temporarily) banning a journalist from London's Independent newspaper, who had been using his Twitter account to
savage NBC for its Olympic coverage (if nothing else, Twitter served as a
useful aggregator for the groundswell of vitriol generated toward NBC).
The
London Olympics were to be a proving ground for two of the TV industry's big
hopes - social and streaming TV. It's clear that neither were as well executed
as they could have been - certainly not
gold medal worthy. But like any good competitor, NBC (and Twitter) will
undoubtedly dust themselves off and give it another go in Sochi.
