The ratings for the Beijing Olympics are way up over Athens. The Los Angeles Times reports that NBC’s 12-day average prime-time viewership is 29.3 million for Beijing, up from 26.1 million in Athens. With so many people watching the likes of beach volleyball champs Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, Gymnastics studs Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson, and the dominating swimming performance by Michael Phelps, it’s no wonder why the Olympics are so popular.
However, if there is one complaint about the coverage, it’s that NBC hasn’t aired enough live events – something ESPN is hoping to capitalize on.
John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content says that “[ESPN’s] DNA is different than theirs [NBC]. We serve sports fans. It’s hard in our culture to fathom tape-delaying in the same way they have. I’m not suggesting it wasn’t the smart thing for them to do, but it’s not our culture…We would never put an event on tape delay. When we put ‘live’ on the screen, we mean ‘live right now.’ We don’t mean live three hours ago.”
While I was watching the Olympics last night, I noticed that the men’s 200 meter run was not shown live, but an interview with Shawn Johnson (about her Gold medal high beam performance) was. I understand how popular Johnson is in these Olympics games, but the 200m was a really exciting race and the U.S. finished in 2nd and 3rd. Bolt also broke Michael Johnson’s world record time, and the athletes that originally placed 2nd and 3rd in the race (one from the U.S.) ended up being disqualified for stepping on the line. How was this not live?
NBC has made big news with extended online video, including 2,200 hours of live coverage, thanks to Microsoft’s Silverlight. However, the reality is that ESPN has a valid point – we want to watch these sports live, not hear about the results online then watch the event afterwards, already knowing the results. That’s part of the beauty of sports – the excitement that no one knows what will happen next.
Noel Hidalgo was walking around Tiananmen Square in China on Saturday when he came across a free-Tibet protest. He decided to Twittertheprotest, and also broadcast it live over Qik.
It turned out that the live broadcast ended up being his ticket home.
Chinese authorities deported Hidalgo as a result of the live video streaming, sending him back to the United States. So while it has been reported that many Chinese have been very eager to please visitors during the Olympic Games, it turns out that anything involving Tibet is crossing the line.
As the Olympic Games kickoff tomorrow in Beijing, the best athletes around the world will be competing for gold, silver, and bronze medals in their respective events.
While you’re on the couch, no doubt witnessing some of the greatest athletic performances of the year, or ever, you’ll also be watching some other competitions coming straight into your living room.
Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain will be competing for your vote – and spending a combine $11 million in the process. NBC sure is lucky that the Olympics fall during the same time as campaign season!
Meanwhile, Olympic sponsors such as Coca-Cola, Adidas, and McDonalds (powering Olympic athletes? Suuuuuure) are giddy at the sight of having an attentive television audience and the ability to market their products to Asia. These types of ‘global sponsors’ have paid an average of $72 million each, but one study found that only 15 percent of 1,500 Chinese city dwellers could name at least two of the 12 global sponsors.
So while you’re watching some of the world’s greatest athletes over the next couple weeks, try not to think about the companies and politicians competing for your money and votes – just enjoy the moments that the summer Olympics bring us ever 4 years.
Even while the Olympic Games will be taking place on the other side of the world, viewers will now be able to watch whatever events they want, thanks to some cool new technology.
No, not YouTube – that’s only available to countries that don’t have access to NBC and their long line of advertisers.
Instead, NBC’s Olympics Web site will feature 2,200 hours of live coverage, thanks to Microsoft’s Silverlight, their equivalent of Flash (However, this will only be available to viewers in the U.S.).
Thanks to this technology, viewers will have the ability to:
- See multiple camera angles & rewind video.
- Watch whatever sport they want whenever they want.
- See 3,000 hours of ‘on-demand encores of full events and highlights’.
- Switch between up to 4 live streams.
- See the standard world feed that is sent to all broadcasters, with no TV commentators.
- Access statistics, biographies and other information.
This enhanced Olympics viewing experience will be great for people looking to catch certain events that aren’t always on TV, especially as NBC aims to stick countless hours of competition into nicely organized time slots during their prime time hours.
With the Olympics starting on Friday, there is so much to look forward to. I can’t wait to see the track & field events – especially the 1500 and 5000 meter races. Volleyball is always exciting to watch, and who doesn’t want to see Michael Phelps’s attempt for eight gold medals? However, what most people don’t realize that until this year, not everyone had access to this worldwide event.
Thanks to the popular video site, for the first time ever the Olympic Games will reach 77 territories that aren’t officially covered by Olympic sponsors, including South Korea, India and Nigeria, according to The Wall Street Journal.
YouTube will be streaming about three hours a day of exclusive content from the Olympics on a dedicated channel during the Games. However, viewers from outside those 77 territories will be blocked from the channel because of broadcast rights.
While it’s hard to believe that the Olympics weren’t available around the world before 2008, it’s pretty funny to think that the first year they will be available worldwide (via the internet) will be the same year the Olympics are taking place in Beijing – where open internet access has become such a hot issue.
It was reported a while ago that China was going to allow uncensored internet during the Olympics in Beijing next month. Well, apparently that’s not quite true anymore.
The New York Times reports that “since the Olympic Village press center opened on Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC’s Chinese-language news, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.”
For reporters covering the games, it is important that they have access to the internet to research, communicate, and file their stories. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had negotiated with China to provide unregulated internet access, but China’s concern for their national security, particularly relating to Tibet, has trumped their one-time promise that there would be an open access for all.
In a world where some people are connected to the internet 24/7 via their cell phones or other devices, China’s decision to block certain sites and information from thousands of foreign reporters and their own citizens seems like quite a bold move.
What’s your take? Should countries have the right block certain sites that they believe are dangerous for their national security?
UPDATE (8/1)
The Associated Press is reporting that some sites have been unblocked at the main press center & media venues on Friday, after the IOC met with some Chinese officials.
Nicholas Negroponte took the stage with David Kirkpatrick at Fortune Brainstorm: TECH to address the crowd on where the One Laptop per Child project currently stands earlier this morning. Some excerpts below:
DK: Happy to have you on stage, along with your XO.
You have transformed a new way to get technology into the hands of kids across the world. However, you’ve often talked about goals that haven’t been achieved. How do you describe the state of OLPC?
NN: You need a certain amount of hype. Some of it was that. We had to change our targets as we began to see which countries really were going to put a full effort behind one laptop for every child in their country. Peru is going to do a million this year. If I was running a company that would be pretty good to go from $0-$200 million (if they were paying for each computer) in one market - in one year.
DK: Do you sometimes wish that you had made it a business and not a non-profit philanthropy effort?
NN:Never. What the non-profit does is create the mission for us. We don’t look at the developing world as a market, we look at it as a mission. When I go to each head of state they know that I am talking with them about a mission to transform education in their countries and not giving them a sales’ speech. It also allows us to attract the top talent that want to be part of a true mission, without even thinking about earning a salary.
DK: So the XO that you have with you does something different then the XO’s in the developing world right now?
NN:Yes, this is a dual-boot XO that runs both Windows and Linux (Negroponte boots in Windows for the crowd).
NN: We will kick-off a global “Give One, Get One” program within the next few months.
Disclosure: One Laptop per Child is a client of the Racepoint Group.
With the U.S. Olympic Trials for track and swimming now complete, it’s a good time to look at how the Olympic Games are affecting China. Besides the protests surrounding the conflict with Tibet and the massive tourism increase that China will see from the Olympics, some Chinese citizens will also be out of work for a couple months.
According to The New York Times, the city of Tianjin (located about 70 miles east of Beijing) has ordered 40 factories to suspend some operations for two months in order to improve the air quality during the Olympics.
The details around these closings are very unclear, and don’t address whether or not these workers will still be compensated for the time their factories are closed. In either case, I’d be shocked if China was prepared for everything that has happened so far as a result of hosting the Olympics, and wouldn’t be surprised if there’s many Chinese leaders that would have preferred to avoid this altogether.
2. Internet privacy has become an issue and China has had to ensure the Olympic Committee that it would allow all athletes and media to have full internet access during the games.
4. Some of China’s factories have to close down in order to decrease the pollution around the Olympic sites. The pollution is so bad that some countries are worried about bringing their athletes to Beijing too far in advance of their events.
Can you imagine running a marathon in that city with that much pollution? What’s your take on China as the Olympics quickly approach?
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Dunkin’ Donuts pulled an advertisement featuring Rachel Ray this week when the scarf she was wearing caused a massive stir.
Critics complained that the black and white frayed scarf looked like a kaffiyeh, a traditional Arab headdress – which some say symbolizes Muslim extremism and terrorism, according to the Boston Globe.
Little Green Footballs was the first to claim that Dunkin’ Donuts was promoting terrorism:
I didn’t believe this story when people first started emailing about it; but sure enough, it’s true. Dunkin Donuts, the venerable old fried dough seller, is the latest American firm to casually promote the symbol of Palestinian terrorism and the intifada, the kaffiyeh, via Rachael Ray: Dunkin’ Breakfast Choices.
It was with some dismay that I learned last week that Dunkin’ Donuts spokeswoman Rachael Ray, the ubiquitous TV hostess, posed for one of the company’s ads in what appeared to be a black-and-white keffiyeh.
The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not so ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities and left-wing icons.
Dunkin’ Donuts has decided to pull an Internet ad featuring the compulsively perky Rachel Ray because a handful of blithering idiots said they objected to a scarf she was wearing; that the scarf resembles a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Arab men that some associate with jihad. Where do I begin going into how utterly lame and stupid this is.
Do you think people are being too sensitive to Ray’s scarf?
