Web TV and Winter Olympics

Liz Gannes on the US experience of Winter Olympic Web TV

NBC knew at the outset of the games it would be losing money on broadcasting them due to licensing costs but still took an extremely cautious approach to making events accessible online, rather than experimenting with the web to goose revenue. To its credit, the network finally opened up a couple of high-profile events toward the end of the Olympics for live streaming, allowing access to users without requiring them to authenticate themselves as paying cable subscribers. But I found it incredibly frustrating that given the major advances in live-streaming video and video advertising since the Beijing Olympics (see my sub req’d story on GigaOM Pro about adaptive bitrate streaming), NBC ratcheted down its content so tightly — offering an estimated 400 hours of live video coverage compared to 2,200 two years ago.

There are two interesting subtexts here:

Firstly, the US stuff was in the same timezone, ideal for the established Web TV "watch later" model to function. In the UK it was on late at night so we were watching it live on conventional TV during the usual "catch up" time late at night. Web TV still can't compete with "real" TV for this, it was a no-brainer to be up a 2.30am watching the BBC

Secondly, there was far more going on at any one time than a few standard TV network channels could cover. This is where Web TV should really complement broadcast TV. The high profile event shown live on Web TV was the Ice Hockey game, with 500,000 streams - but long term I can't really see the point of trying to compete head to head on the main events, as that is not where Web TV economics really work except as a way of goosing revenue (as Liz puts it )

But to me, the really amazing lesson of the Winter Olympics has been how exciting the Curling has been. Partly its been the very close matches, but as the Huffington Post points out, it may also be because so many of the players are so cute