Canadians (and Twitter) Take Live Olympics Coverage Gold

by Shawn Lam

In my last blog post I discussed the differences between the Canadian CTV and the American NBC coverage of the opening ceremonies. When I wrote that post the Olympics had barely started and I thought the perfect way to follow-up on the opening ceremony coverage was to comment on the closing ceremony coverage. Lucky for you I came up with a better idea, as I’m sure the network producers were too busy with 17 straight days of non-stop Olympics coverage to read my little post and make changes that would result in a closing ceremony video production that would be different enough so as to give me something novel to write about. So instead of the closing ceremony coverage I’m going to discuss what has changed in viewership trends since the Calgary 1988 games, the last time Canada hosted the Olympic games.

Early on in the Olympics, my brother and I were both away from a TV and eager to get an update one of the team Canada hockey game scores. I challenged him that I could find out the score faster using an iPhone Olympics app than he could on Twitter. I can’t remember who was faster but what was apparent was that we both were not willing to wait until we got home to watch a replay on TV. Yes, watching the game is entertainment in itself, but a large part of why we watch sports is for the outcome, and to share in the moment. It is kind of like living vicariously through the athletes. So we were placing more importance on getting a live, or as close to live-result as tweets would allow, than see it for ourselves at a later time. We also discovered that many in the twittersphere were resorting to Twitter because they were not able to watch the games live on their TV at home—more on that in a bit.

Back in ’88 we had one broadcaster (CBC) covering the games in Canada and they broadcast the games on one channel. The coverage was a mix of very little live coverage for the higher-profile events and tape delay for everything else. Because the coverage was on a single channel, the delay was necessary in most cases because of the same problem that time travelers face, the time-space continuum, which restricts events that happen at the same time from appearing on the same channel at the same time. The delay solved part of the problem but there were simply too many hours of events to show everything so some events were never shown outside of the highlight reel and those that were shown were edited for content. NPR (National Public Radio) terms the American version of this type of editing “USA-Plus” and explain it as:

meaning you see the Americans, plus a few other people who are relevant because they either do very well or wipe out spectacularly

Jump forward to 2010 and the Olympics broadcast rights holders have multiple TV stations, a website with up-to-date results and streaming video, iPhone applications, and several more ways to disseminate the results as quickly as they happen. So with all these mediums at their disposal you would think that the broadcasters would have done away with the tape delays for an Olympics that happen in a North American time zone.

It turns out, as I alluded to earlier that I learned through Twitter, that NBC was tape delaying virtually everything in an effort to make it fit into prime time. Techcrunch did a statistical analysis of over 25,000 tweets, blog, and forum posts and concluded that 73% of tweets of NBC Olympics are negative. One of the problems with the delay strategy is that it is flawed. NBC lumped the entire US nation into the Eastern Standard Time (EST) zone and further delayed the coverage across the three other zones in the continental US. So my friends in Seattle who are in the same PST time zone as the actual events were taking place, had to wait an additional 3 hours beyond the already tape delayed event coverage. I can understand the desire to put everything in prime time but there are four prime times, one in each time zone, and why not simply show the events live and replay them again in prime time?

As a Canadian and Vancouverite, I feel spoiled by my Olympics experience. Not only did I experience an increase in Olympics related video work and got to take part in some of the festivities in downtown Vancouver, I also got the best Olympics coverage. Our Olympics broadcaster is actually a Canadian consortium of several affiliated TV channels, headed by CTV and Rogers. At any given time Canadians could watch Olympics coverage on one of 8 English and 3 French language channels, mostly live. And when I wasn’t able to get away from an assignment on my computer, I was able to listen and watch the event streamed live on the web. So what did this do for ratings? CTV-Rogers reported that 91% of the Canadian population watched at least some part of the consortium’s game coverage on the final day of the Olympics. Sure it helped that Canada was competing for its 14th gold medal, breaking the all time gold medal record—on home soil—while playing hockey—but the point is that if the entire country was on tape delay it is likely that Canadians would have been responsible for crashing twitter in a collective effort to stay on top of the score and few would then bother to watch the delayed version.

So I guess what I am getting at is that I think NBC missed a huge opportunity to make their coverage more relevant to their viewers by giving them more and presenting the games as they happened, rather than the 1988-style repackaged version starting at suppertime in the East and at bedtime in the West.

More importantly, the change that is evident is that viewers want their video right away. How this plays out in our smaller corporate and event markets is that our customers are increasingly demanding live and almost live video in addition to or instead of the carefully edited masterpieces that we used to painstakingly produce. We see this in weddings in the form of a SDE (Same Day Edit), in the corporate and sports worlds as a webcast, to a conference audience as a live switch projected on a screen, and as UCG (User Generated Content) from cell phones to social networking websites. In the end, many fans will remember the 2010 Winter Olympics as the games where Canada upstaged the US in hockey and in gold medals, but I’ll always remember it as the event where Canada set the gold standard of live video coverage for years to come.

Shawn Lam (video at shawnlam.ca) runs Shawn Lam Video, a Vancouver video production studio. He specializes in stage event and corporate video production, is president emeritus of the BCPVA, and is a contributing editor to EventDV.