Positive Energy

The oldest instrument and the Olympics…

As a fan of ancient Greek things and of the Olympics - ancient and modern - I loved this article: apparently, one of the functions of the world’s oldest-known scientific instrument was keeping a schedule of upcoming Olympic games.

Every Olympic year since at least 1992, I hear sports commentators (I listen to a lot of sports-talk radio during my commute) talk about how the Olympics “don’t mean much any more”, with the lack of a US/USSR rivalry, problems with performance-enhancing drugs, decrease in “amateur spirit”, increased commercialization, and other issues cited as causes.

I couldn’t disagree more, and I think that increasing participation - both in terms of numbers of athletes, and in terms of engaged viewing audience - is evidence to the contrary.  The Olympics is certainly different today than it was in 1984, or 1960, or 1912, or 500 B.C. - but less significant?  No.

I can’t wait for next week - it’s about 6 days and 9 hours before competition starts.  (What, you thought the Olympics started Friday evening?  No - soccer matches start on Wednesday before the opening ceremony, specifically at 2am Pacific.)

NBC “live” coverage delay details…

Further details came out today about NBC’s Olympic live-coverage-that-isn’t-live.  Apparently, “popular” events will be available online after the Pacific coverage of the event.

I’m probably reading too much into their wording, but I’m optimistically seizing onto their qualification of “popular” events, hoping that suggests that a large portion of events (even many of those with TV coverage) will still be available live online.  We’ll see.

Ghost Patrol

I haven’t posted about this before, but the puzzlehunt team that I captain, Meat Machine, spent a few weeks in late June/early July preparing an application for Ghost Patrol, a Ghostbusters-themed Game coming up in November (likely the only full-length Game of 2008).

A large part of the application was a “creative project” that could take one of three forms:

- building a ghost-capturing device

- creating a video commercial or print marketing campaign for the Ghost Patrol corporation

- making a video displaying your attempts to capture a ghost

Meat Machine decided to satisfy the first category, albeit in a rather loosely-interpreted way, and the “device” is located here.  Feel free to participate (in character, ideally).

In any case, since three of our team members are in the national finals for the Great Urban Race during the weekend that the actual Ghost Patrol Game will be held, Meat Machine was actually aiming to participate in the full playtest in October (good Game Controls will typically run a complete dress rehearsal a few weeks before a Game).  I’m pleased to report that we’ll be doing so.

Killing and Winning

Brad Feld posted today, adding to/agreeing with a sentiment expressed in an email by Jason Calacanis: basically wondering why, in the tech industry (and many other industries) competition gets framed as trying to “kill” other companies.  Brad writes, “We as a industry are obsessed with death. And its a trap that clouds your thinking. Facebook did not kill MySpace, YouTube did not kill Hulu, Google did not kill eBay, Pownce did not kill Twitter, and I could go on and on and on.”

I’ve had similar sentiments for a few years now about “winning”.  I hear from colleagues, entrepreneurs, VCs, and many others: “What does it take to win?” … “Can we win?” … “Win or go home!” … and so on.

Look, when I’m playing sports or games, I’m competitive: I want to win.  That’s how those activities are structured, and it’s fun to compete.  Why the need for businesses to co-opt that mindset, though?  If I can make a gazillion dollars, should I care that much if another company makes 1.2 gazillion?  There are lots of thoroughly profitable companies that have created a lot of value for their owners (and their customers) that may not lead their industry with regard to revenue or profit or buzz or whatever other metric you might choose.  Have those businesses “lost”?  Should they give up and go home?  Should they make some sort of desperate, bet-the-company move in an attempt to “win”?

Mark Cuban on small businesses

Mark Cuban wrote a post on small businesses today that resonated with a lot of people, myself included.  The short version of his thesis is: to jumpstart the economy, remove the tax and regulatory/paperwork burdens on small businesses.

My wife Melissa ran a small business for five years, offering interior design consulting services.  It’s currently dormant, primarily due to health issues, but also partly due to the fact that her net income simply wasn’t worth the hassles and stresses of operating the business.

She was very successful: she was frequently turning away prospective clients due to an overfull schedule and making a high yearly gross revenue.  Her marginal tax rate (including federal, state, and self-employment tax) on that revenue, however, was around 50% (and maybe a bit more).  The cost-benefit equation of her post-tax earnings against workload, stress, and liability leans to the negative side, and I don’t expect her to resume operating the business (at least, not to the previous scale) in the future.

Mark focuses on employer taxes and paperwork, which were a small hassle in our case, but the basic tax burden, which he passes over, is still a problem on the margin.  (Some of the commenters on Mark’s post, and to a degree Mark himself, fall into the common error of thinking “people don’t decide whether or not to do X based on things like taxes”.  Maybe they don’t; maybe most people don’t.  People on the margin - like Melissa - do, though; and in her case, there’s less paint, fewer pieces of furniture, less contracting, etc. being sold in the Bay Area because she’s deciding not to operate her business - not to mention fewer well-designed homes!)

His concluding paragraph, however, is spot on:

“In today’s climate, its politically expedient to volunteer taxpayer money as a solution to all problems. That’s wrong. Instead, we should open the door to our country’s Intellectual capital and the entrepreneurial energy that separates us from the rest of the world. Make it easy for entrepreneurs to do what entrepreneurs do, and great things happen. Voters and politicians alike seem to have forgotten what has made this country an economic powerhouse.”

Tight security at the Beijing Games; US athletics qualifying rules

This is too amusing not to post:

Included on the illegal items list for spectators at the Olympics next month are “crossbows and daggers”.

Also, I learned something new, which I thought I’d share, about qualifying rules for the USA Athletics (that’s the official name for what us Americans usually call “track & field”) squad, based on this story from today.  In general, to make the Olympics, a trackster has to 1) finish in the top 3 in her event at the Trials, and 2) meet the “A standard” during a certain window of time established by track’s governing body (roughly from the beginning of the year to a few weeks before the Games, with a bit of variation for a few endurance events).

When the top three haven’t all met the A standard (true for 6 out of the 43 non-relay events this year), typically the best three from among those who have met the A standard are selected.  … but there are some weird exceptions, partly based on the fact that there’s also an Olympic “B standard”, by which an athlete can qualify if she’s the only representative for a given country.  (Basically, if country X wants to send 3 people, they have to meet a tough A standard.  If noone meets the A standard, then it can send one person who meets the B standard.  If noone meets the B standard, then the country doesn’t have a representative in that event.)

Here’s what I learned.  The USA athletics team’s philosophy is simple:

1) Send as many athletes as possible to the Olympics.

2) Send the top finishers in the Trials such that you’re adhering to principle #1.

(Among other things, that means that if a B-standard athlete wins and beats the only A standard athlete in the trials, the B-standard athlete goes to the Olympics.  If there are two or three A standard athletes, though, they’ll go and the B-standard athlete stays home.)

I like these principles: maximize participation, and then select by performance.

The relays provide the only exception to these rules; for relays, individual representatives in the distance that makes up the relay are automatically on the team (e.g., the 3 women who qualify in the 100m are on the 4x100m relay), and coaches select the remaining members according to various (largely subjective) criteria.

NBC Olympic coverage, continued

More information coming out this week about NBC’s (TV and online) coverage of the Beijing Olympics: live coverage of every swimming final (nice) and live coverage of both men’s and women’s marathons (nice).

They’re reiterating that the 7-channel NBCU network will somehow average 212 hours of programming per day, which is more than 30 hours per day per network - somebody needs to explain this to me.

By-channel coverage:
NBC: 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.***
8 p.m. – 11:30 p.m.**
Midnight – 1:30 a.m.**
MSNBC: 5 a.m. – 5 p.m.*
CNBC: Midnight – 4:30 a.m.*
5:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.*
USA: 2 a.m. – 12 p.m.*
OXYGEN: 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.**
TELEMUNDO: 2:00 a.m.-6:00 a.m.**
8:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.**
Midnight – 1:00 a.m.**

*ET
**ET/PT
***All time zones

As I mentioned before, this weird partly-synchronized, partly-not schedule means that there wil be gaps and overlaps for us West-Coast viewers.

More on NBC’s Olympics coverage

A funny statement about NBC’s coverage of the upcoming Olympics caught my eye today:

“NBC has scheduled 3,600 hours of Olympics programming on its main network, along with Telemundo, USA, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC and Bravo. That’s the equivalent of eight days of programming packed into each day.”

That’s impressive - not just the number of hours, but the fact that they’ve apparently managed to squeeze “eight days of programming… each day” into seven channels, meaning there’s at least one channel that’s somehow showing more than… one day of programming per day.  (Perhaps NBC has found a way to warp the fabric of space-time.  More realistically, I suspect they’ve got some additional channels they’re not mentioning in the story - like an HD channel, and they’re double-counting the (identical) coverage that they show on channel X and HD channel X.)

More substantively, NBC did say that they’re using these Olympics as a “billion-dollar research lab” into how people consume media across various platforms, including streaming online video, video on demand, and mobile devices, in addition to regular TV.

So, having swung from applauding NBC’s online coverage strategy to criticizing it, I’m now settling somewhere in the middle.  I get that NBC’s a big old-media company (that’s paid a gazillion dollars to cover the Olympics over most of the past two decades, and has generally done a good job) and that they’re not going to be on the bleeding edge of Web 3.0.  I wish they’d be even more aggressive and open with distributing their content, but I’m glad for what they provide, I recognize that the volume of coverage is light-years beyond what it was just eight years ago, and I’m glad that they’re (at least) experimenting.  … and when the company’s research chief says “I have no idea how people are going to use this stuff,” I appreciate his (public and intellectual) honesty.

I just wish that I were part of their survey panels: I’d tell them to bring back the Triplecast.  :)

Trials coverage

Okay, instead of moaning about NBC’s online Olympics coverage before I actually see it and find out whether it’s any good or not, I’m going to complain about something I have seen: their Trials coverage.

The actual event broadcasting isn’t terrible. There are things I’d like see differently:

- I’d like to see more of the field events. I understand that live coverage of field events isn’t super-exciting, in part because there’s a low ratio of action-to-waiting-around. However, it would be great to see, say, a rapid-fire sequence of all of the attempts of the leading athletes. (Baseball coverage has figured this out: more and more, they’re showing a very quick recap of an at-bat by showing all the pitches, giving about 1-2 seconds per pitch.) I’d love to see, say, 30 high jump attempts in 5 minutes. You’re tape-delaying it anyway - hire an assistant editor and have them splice this together.

- I don’t like cutting away from the action in the middle of the long-distance races. The 5000m (e.g.) is exciting; I want to see what happens in between minute 3 and minute 7. I don’t think I’m going to get my wish any time soon on this one, though.

I can live with flaws, though (esp. since the competition has been pretty exciting). What’s killing me, though, is the inconsistent timing of the coverage.

- Thursday and Friday, the track & field coverage was listed at 11pm Eastern time on the USA channel; it was also shown at 11pm Pacific. I’d prefer an earlier time, but I dealt with it.

- Saturday, the coverage was scheduled for 5pm Eastern, so I made sure I was in front of my TV at 5pm Pacific: nothing. What the hell? This time, they showed it at 2pm Pacific, and I missed it. Grrr.

- Today, the coverage was scheduled for 5pm Eastern again. I get in front of the TV at 2pm Pacific, and again, nothing. I recheck and see that they’ve changed the schedule to 7pm Eastern/7pm Pacific. Arrgh.

Similarly, if NBC operates the same way they did in Athens, the actual Olympics themselves will also be a little messed up for the West Coast. Part of their big promotion then was “24-hour coverage” - NBC would always have coverage on at least one of their channels (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, and USA were the primary 4). The problem: some of those channels would show events simultaneously on the East and West Coasts, and others would show events 3 hours later on the West Coast. So, for Californians, there were times when you couldn’t see anything, and times when there were two interesting events on at the same time.

Online Olympics coverage: too good to be true

A week or so ago, I was getting excited about the rich online coverage NBC was going to offer for the upcoming Olympics.  That coverage is apparently going to be a lot more restrictive than I had hoped.  Two points to highlight:

1) Olympic video cannot be displayed on any website other than www.nbcolympics.com.

Sigh.  Implications for NBC: your online viewership probably decreases (e.g., I’d definitely click back to NBC after seeing an interesting clip from some event on another site, to see more context) and you move toward the “doesn’t get it” side of the spectrum regarding online content.  Implications for me: the NBC site probably won’t be able to handle demand and so I’ll be out of luck for less-popular videos that don’t get illegally distributed.

As an aside, one of the things I thought I’d been observing in the past 12 months was that “old media” companies seemed to finally be “getting Web 2.0”.  Many newspapers, publishing houses, TV networks, music labels, etc. seemed to have made moves in the second half of 2007 or the first half of 2008 indicating that they were finally starting to get on board with the rest of the online world (maybe I’ll expound on this in another post).  For NBC, this is a big step backward, IMO.

2) No events that are scheduled for TV broadcast - on any of NBC’s 6 Olympic channels - will be available online until after they’ve been aired.

Are you kidding me??  I’m speechless.  This doesn’t qualify as “coverage”; it’s remnant live video plus an after-the-fact replay library.  I can guess the mindset: they don’t want to reduce viewership by having people watch online and then not watch the main TV broadcast, for big events.  Though I’m wary of extrapolating my own behavior to the mass market (an early eBay colleague once informed me that I was an “extreme edge case”), this is a situation where my instincts strongly say that TV viewership increases due to live online coverage.  If I see something amazing online at 3 am, I’m probably going to tune in the next day to see it live - on a big screen, with more color & context around it, and just to see it again with the non-die-hards in my family who weren’t awake in the middle of the previous night.

One of my favorite Olympic memories is from the 1994 Lillehammer Games.  Dan Jansen - the best short-distance speedskater in the late 80’s and early 90’s - had heart-breakingly fallen short of an Olympic medal in ‘84, ‘88, ‘92, and in the 500m (his better race) in ‘94.  His last opportunity for a place on the podium was in the 1000m.  The morning of the race, the TV announcer told the audience to turn down their volume and look away for a moment if they didn’t want to know the current results (the event was happening as he spoke, but wouldn’t be broadcast until that evening), and then informed us that Jansen, with only a few, non-medal-hopeful skaters left to compete, was in the lead, having set a new world record.

Nothing could have kept me away from the TV coverage that night - if I had had a wife who was having a baby, I probably would have skipped the birth.  It wasn’t the race itself - speedskating isn’t the most exciting sport when you already know the results; it was the experience.  … and the coverage was phenomenal.  I usually don’t have patience for the human interest stories, but CBS showed an absolutely fantastic piece, centered on a prior interview of Dan’s wife Robin by Charles Kuralt.  She talked about how she and Dan had made peace with his Olympic misfortune and then, just for a moment - when Charles said “what if, after all these years of Olympic agony, there is, at the end of it all, a place on the podium for your husband at last, and a flag flying?” - she showed a glimmer of hope, and her eyes lit up… and then you could see her remind herself “no, we’ve been through this; I can’t let myself revive the dream, because I’ll be disappointed again”, and she reassumed her resigned, but calm, demeanor.   Then, minutes later, Dan was receiving his gold medal, with his baby in his arms.  I bawled when I saw it the first time and I still tear up now at the memory.

This is what I’m talking about.  I watched more TV coverage that night because I knew it was a dramatic, special event and I wanted to experience all of the color around it, even though I already knew what had happened.  In this instance, at least, I don’t think I’m an edge case.

Here’s a further argument: TV networks are already aware of this phenomenon!  They sell highlight videos of the World Series and the NCAA basketball tournament and, yes, the Olympics.  People pay money for the privilege of watching something they’ve already seen, weeks after the fact.  Why does NBC worry they wouldn’t tune in for free TV coverage that night?

Four years from now, this may not even be an issue.  Spectators with mobile phones with high-quality video capability will stream live coverage of every event to Qik or Kyte.tv or whatever platform ends up winning in that space.  It may not have commentary or color - that’s what NBC will be for, and that’s fine.  … and I’ll still watch both.