20th
Pining for the Triplecast, but glad for online Olympics coverage
When I saw that various blogs have quoted John Malone as predicting that NBC’s plan to stream thousands of hours of live and recorded video during the Olympics this summer will fail, I took note, since ths subject was at the intersection of my industry (the consumer internet) and one of my top passions (the Olympics; one of my dearest friends noted long ago that my “Olympics fetish has become even more pathological with age”).
I’m not a Web 2.0 purist who subscribes* to the Chis Anderson school of thought that “free is the future of business” - at least, not universally. For many companies, subscriptions and pay-per-use models are the best way to generate revenue. For others, they can be an effective piece of a multi-pronged strategy to serve different customer segments.
In some cases, in fact, “not being free” is a crucial positive factor regarding the customer experience. eBay’s listing fees, for instance, have (especially early in eBay’s history) been an important filter to discourage spam listings. (As with most things, context is important; Taobao competed very successfully against eBay in China with a free-listing model.) For certain dating and job sites, a “cover charge” is important for “keeping out the riffraff” and maintaining the kind of community the company wants to nurture.
All of that said, NBC’s Olympics coverage feels like a case where free internet content will probably help their existing business (or, at least, not hurt it). First of all, a big part of the US Olympics audience is pretty casual; the trend toward human-interest coverage in the last couple of decades is a pretty solid indication of that. Those viewers, by and large, aren’t likely to be fleeing in droves from their TVs to their PCs to see Korean women win gold in archery or to see events live rather than on tape-delay. Hard-core sports fans will probably watch a lot of online coverage, but they’re likely to mostly add that to their existing TV viewing (I fall into this category). Plus, live streams can increase TV viewership through word-of-mouth in the case of particularly dramatic events. (I recall cancelling some other activity during the 1996 Atlanta games to make sure I saw Kerri Strug’s dramatic vault-and-land-on-one-foot to clinch the women’s gymnastics team gold for the US, having heard about it before the West Coast TV broadcast showed it.)
What NBC loses is the opportunity to charge hard-core fans directly. One the better two-week periods in my life was during the 1992 Barcelona games, when NBC offered the Triplecast: 3 cable channels showing Olympic coverage 24 hours a day, showing pure sports with basic commentary (no athlete profiles, no human-interest stories). My family was apparently one of the few to buy the whole enchilada, which was something on the order of $170 for the entire Games. More than once, I would watch until 2 or 3 am, fall asleep on the couch, and wake up at 7 and start watching again. (I was in college, so I also had the luxury of devoting pretty much two uninterrupted weeks.) It was glorious: track & field, swimming, boxing, wrestling, rowing, basketball…
Unfortunately, the Triplecast was a financial disaster (NBC probably lost $100 million on the effort). I’d pay for it again in a second, but there aren’t enough people like me around to make that play viable. … and that’s why NBC’s broadband strategy will probably work out just fine - in 2008, at least. As watching internet video streams in your living room (through whatever channel) becomes widespread, it’ll be more of a concern, but that’s a matter for the future.
*(With apologies for the pun.)
