Look, Maybe We Should All Calm Down
February 19, 2010 6 Comments
What’s done is done, we all can’t change it whatsoever. Let’s try and relax and let things be with the NBC folks. The good folks from NBC have this statement with regards to the overrun:
“Overruns are inherent to sports and we understand they can be frustrating for television viewers. Our six platforms are providing the most Winter Olympic hockey coverage ever and all hockey games are streamed on NBCOlympics.com.”
Alright, I’m going to let it go. At least until next week. I recommend it for everyone else. We’ll all be much healthier mentally. The fact is, the games have happened, there’s no more women’s games in the way of men’s games to bunch up the slate even further, so… move on I suppose. Elaborate on any other complaints in the comments.
About stevelepore
So do not kill anyone until they screw up Sunday….got it Steve!
You have a good point Steve. I’m not sure what they mean by their “six platforms” when only two of them were showing hockey 3 if you include the website which sometimes has audio feeds and sometimes doesn’t. But you are right, we will let it go!
I’m not going to let it go.
I feel that NBC is prioritizing curling and womens hockey over the mens hockey competition on the cable channels. They should have 1 channel devoted to the mens games.
They did that in 2006. At least missing parts of one game meant you were still watching men’s hockey.
Not sure I entirely agree, Steve. But I think it’s a matter of agreeing of what the ends are.
If it’s just to gripe about things that have happened, are scheduled, etc. – that accomplishes nothing. This Olympics is, for all intents and purposes, done. This thing is scheduled through to the end. NBC isn’t going to change anything now.
If, however, we register complaints to build up a critical mass of issues that NBC and the NHL should confront in anticipation of an (unlikely?) NHL appearance in Russia in 2014, or before a new round of league TV deals is sealed, well…that’s a different story.
What the NHL has done in both league and Olympic programming is give NBC free reign. No rights fees on NHL Games of the Week, just profit sharing. Clearly no say in which teams would be on the Games of the Week, as one would think that there are only 6 teams in the entire NHL if you went strictly by what is programmed. And no stipulations on Olympic programming placement at all. NBC has abused the privilege in the many ways that we’ve been shouting about. And both NBC and the NHL need to know that we, the fans, are not pleased with the decisions that they have made in the hopes that they improve the programming and, in the end, improve the NHL. And let’s not even begin to talk about Versus.
So yeah, I’ll let it go to a point. But when I vent, it’s with an eye toward the future.
I don’t completely buy into NBC’s PR machine here, though I do agree with them regarding overruns. The problem is that they look at overruns differently than I do.
To me, an overrun is (and I’ve used this example before) when a game/match/event is scheduled to run from 8pm until 10:30pm (common practice to schedule NHL and NBA games for 2 1/2 hours), and overrun is when the game runs past 10:30pm for whatever reason. It can be frustrating when there’s another game scheduled to begin at 10:30pm and the first few minutes of it are missed. An overrun is NOT, from that example, when the second game is scheduled to start at 10pm while the first game isn’t expected to end until 10:30pm. That’s poor scheduling. Sometimes, it’s not your schedule, and you need to accommodate it.
NBC talks about their “six platforms”. I assume they mean channels on your television. First, only 4 are showing live events (NBC, USA, MSNBC, CNBC). One is purely replays (Universal HD) and the other is news and highlights (Universal Sports). I remember seeing hockey replays on Universal HD in 2006, but I won’t expect a lot of it here, simply because there weren’t many men’s hockey games seen in their entirety on the networks of NBC. Second, part of the problem is that they aren’t using all 4 (or 6) of these platforms to accommodate all of these events. Hockey and Curling aside, I felt NBC was undercutting their coverage on these Olympics (they’re bragging about the most live hours in Winter Olympics history, but most of it is hockey and curling). Take out NBC itself, which isn’t going to devote 2 1/2 hours in prime time to a hockey game, and we still have 3 cable channels with which to show Men’s Hockey, Women’s Hockey, and Curling. If that isn’t enough, or if there’s other conflicts (like WWE and the Dog Show earlier in the week, or MSNBC’s primetime news lineup like CNBC’s daytime business lineup), they have other cable channels with past Olympic experience (Bravo and Oxygen) that they can turn to. Where are those channels? Are the ratings on those channels better than the numbers they’re bragging about for NBC Olympics? Probably not.
Back to the point in hand. I think part of this snafu was caused by NBC not acknowledging on their schedules and publications that some events would be joined in progress, and part of it is just bad scheduling. They thought they could get away with cramming in events onto one channel, people would watch silently, but it didn’t work.