I mostly enjoyed the Summer Olympic games in Beijing. I know many people have bones to pick with the way the coverage was handled by NBC, but I don’t wish to hop aboard that train. And although I was dismayed that certain events were not shown live on the west coast even though they easily could’ve been, it’s hard to argue with the success NBC had doing it their way. Mostly, I’d have to applaud NBC and its results.
My disappointment stems from lack of fully utilizing the test-and-learn environment with its Total Audience Measurement Index (TAMi). While some events were streamed live online, nothing I really wanted to watch was. Plus, the environment of forcing Microsoft “Silverlight” installations in order to watch video impairs the results somewhat.
While I knew TV was a bigger deal than the Internet and no amount of experimenting was likely to change that, I was surprised how miniscule the online viewing component was. Many see the unique website visitors (which were generally in the 6 million to 8 million per day range) and jump to conclusions based on those. The unique reach numbers for online were impressive. Indeed, if we had one-tenth of that amount here at TVbytheNumbers, Bill and I would be dancing a jig in San Francisco.
But I wanted to focus in on the viewing component of online access and when you sort through the numbers published by NBC for actual viewing (not Web visitors who were merely checking medal count updates) the numbers, as reported, were a rounding error. 99.7% of all viewing took place on television. .03% of viewing took place on the Internet. Although the minutes of streaming online were not/are not reported in the TAMi results, I do appreciate NBC making that data available via press release at least a couple of times so we could calculate the actual viewing percentage numbers.
I expected the numbers to be bigger. It would have been nice if NBC had some true test-and-learn capabilities. Versions of the site where it streamed some of the bigger events live, and without needing to download and install Microsoft’s Silverlight software to view the streams. As it stands, we’re likely to hear “of course the number on the Internet was tiny relative to television, NBC didn’t stream any of the good stuff live and they made it a pain in the @&^ to view it!” The truth is, we don’t know what difference any of that actually makes, but the point is, neither does NBC. And that’s a missed opportunity for the peacocks, who seemingly didn’t miss many opportunities with these Olympics.
For now, what TAMi winds up showing is this: “we’re measuring everything – Internet traffic is big, but Internet viewing was tiny. Mobile and Video-on-Demand are even more fractional than Internet. For now, like it or not, only TV really matters.”
The good thing about TAMi is that NBC is keeping it and down the road we’ll get to find out how Internet viewing impacts TV viewing for some of the entertainment programs. While obviously it won’t measure all components of digital distribution, I suspect the impact of the Internet for a show like Heroes will be different than the effect for a sporting event. We’ll find out fairly soon.
Does anyone know why NBC had to have a deal with the local cable company in order to see events live on their website? It's the internet, what do you need the cable company's approval for? My cable company wasn't listed as one of the company's they had a deal with so, I wasn't able to use the NBCOlympics.com live streams.
My frustration with the Olympics was that I think many of the people who write about media for a living were determined to stick to two pre-determined storylines no matter what the facts said.
Those storylines were: 1. NBC's tape-delay strategy was obsolete and would never work in the new media world and 2. Online viewing of the Games would make up a significant percentage of all viewing.
In fact every part of NBC's scheduling worked brilliantly and traditional TV obliterated online viewing, but unfortunately those facts went largely unacknowledged, even by trade press that should know better.
These Olympics call into serious question the conventional wisdom that the public “wants what they want, when they want it.” Given the chance to watch whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, the public overwhelmingly chose to watch what NBC gave them, when NBC gave it to them. There is something compelling there about the nature of television consumption and how it's fundamentally different from internet use, but it rarely gets discussed because it doesn't quite jibe with the pre-determined narrative.
So my hat is really off to you guys for being one of the few outlets to follow this data where it leads and not just where you expected it would lead.
I also tip the cap to NBC. Maybe they were not completely transparent with their data, but give them a break; this is still the corporate media world and not an academic exercise. They could not have been more transparent with these numbers without essentially embarrassing their online division. They made a very high-profile effort to contextualize multi-platform usage and they did the whole industry a service.
It was fun and we learned a lot. Bring on football season.
Fair points, Mikey — and thanks for the kind words. I agree, NBC was very transparent and I too appreciated the service it did by making so much data available. I still think they missed some learning opportunities, but fully agree it's not an academic exercise for my and others behalf.
I think you're probably spot-on about television consumption being fundamentally different than Internet usage and sadly, generally agree that it's not discussed much because it doesn't jibe with a pre-determined narrative.