e-Vents

[ Tuesday ]

 

Olympics 2008: NBC - 1, MSN Video - 0

Coverage of the Beijing Olympics for the USA market is adequate, with General Electric's NBC Division exercising their exclusive rights to edit what television viewers and computer users see, and when they see it.

For those viewers in the USA desiring to see the opening ceremonies in real time, some 12 hours ahead of the eastern time zone, they were (almost) out of luck. NBC wanted to preserve their broadcast rights and not dilute the advertising revenue, and chose to tape-delay the ceremonies until prime-time Friday evening on 8.08.08. But many viewers with internet access needed only to log into foreign websites (CBC) or monitor YouTube for uploads of video. While Google attempted to remove copyrighted video, others popped up almost as quickly as Google could remove earlier posts.

Some users of TOR navigated the web with proxies in order to 'legitimately' view live content being streamed through non-USA sites. NBC's reasoning for not allowing live streaming on their site was flawed from the very beginning.

Just as teasers and promos help lure viewers to NBC's programming, the web coverage would have prompted most surfers to tune it later that night to see the taped broadcast on their televisions, which incidentally, provide better quality viewing and, in most cases, larger screens than the pitiful Microsoft MSN Video site.

And speaking of the NBC Olympics website, the thousands of hours of coverage as promoted are somewhat misleading. NBC still refrains from live online streaming of some events, saving them for later taped broadcast. And when attempting to view some events on the 'enhanced' screen, viewers must wait for a commercial advertisement to play, only to discover that the program is not available, and to 'check local coverage' for other events. At that point, switching to a different event generally brings up another commercial advertisement and, occasionally, a repeat of the same.

The biggest disappointment, however, is the MSN Video. Rather than use flash video (like YouTube and everyone else), Microsoft wanted to promote their own version...SilverLight. So, upon initially using the NBC site, the MS application has to be installed on your computer. Once installed, the video plays well. But the enhanced screen cannot be viewed in full screen mode, and the window for the video player cannot be maximized. A missed opportunity for both NBC and Microsoft. Perhaps they felt that the quality of a full screen would not be acceptable to viewers, but if that was the case, they should have used Adobe's flash.

Fear not...many of the highlights will eventually appear on YouTube, and viewers will forget the poor experience of watching another Microsoft product release. (Remember Vista?)

MM [09:34]