Ratings suck and while it could be the venue (and probably is to a certain extent, Rio is a paradigm of the corruption of the International Olympic Committee) it’s more probable that it’s the terrible and unwatchable coverage being offered by NBC.
NBC knows who to blame for poor Olympics ratings — millennials and their “Facebook or Snapchat bubbles”
by Scott Eric Kaufman, Salon
Friday, Aug 19, 2016 01:20 PM EST
The problem for NBC is that broadcast rights don’t produce the same revenue streams they once did, especially not among that most coveted 18-49-year-old demographic. As Bloomberg’s Gerry Smith noted, NBCUniversal’s CEO Steve Burke joked in June that his Olympic nightmare would be to “wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent.”
“If that happens,” he added, “my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it.” Ratings are only down 17 percent from the London Olympics, so his nightmare scenario is technically incomplete — but that’s the equivalent of claiming a dream in which your teeth are falling out while standing naked before a classroom doesn’t qualify as a “nightmare” because you’re not also being chased.
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The problem NBC faces is a general disinterest among members of the non-traditional television-watching demographic for sporting spectacles. This apathy could be because of the rise of alternative viewing options — Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu have each grown substantially in the years since the London games — or it could simply be that the nature of NBC’s coverage doesn’t resonate with the younger generation.Every athlete is introduced according to the conventions of programming that doesn’t appeal to millennials — a “Dateline”-esque account of triumph in the inner city, for example, or a heartwarming “Hallmark Hall of Fame” tale about losing a parent at a young age. It’s difficult to capture an audience by selling it a product it’s already indicated an unwillingness to buy.
Expect more of these “dog won’t eat the dogfood” moments as Corporate Idiots refuse to believe that their failing business models are due to their own incompetence.
I hate those biographic profiles. Don’t tell me who to root for, just show me the damn race.
Oh and save the money you’re wasting on your talentless on air “talent”. They and you should get a real job you lazy parasites.
3 comments
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Vent Hole
Hi Ek.
criticizing NBC is shooting fish in a barrel, but it’s still both fun and correct.
I love the network idiots trying to explain poor ratings with every excuse other than the factual “poor coverage”. It’s not the “facebook bubble” or “snapchat bubble”, it’s the internet generation that has stopped playing along with NBC’s preference for tape–delaying everything into prime time.
And I’m with you on the heartwarming bio pieces: quit them. Don’t give me a 5-minute pre-done video on the wonderful American athlete; show me 5 minutes of Olympic competition in some other sport that I wouldn’t have seen.
Author
Hear, hear.