NOW THAT EITHER a summer or winter Olympic Games occur every other year, the whole mega-ritual has become almost too familiar to seem really special; especially as packaged for American network TV.
The drill can be as painful as mile 24 of a marathon, and lasts much longer. Network officials invariably overpay for the rights to the games, then decide American viewers aren’t really interested in the sporting competitions.
So they end up televising only brief snippets of the various contests–just enough to set the stage for the supposed real audience grabbers, the slickly-edited personality profiles and human-interest vignettes.
During these segments, the athletes try their hardest to project enough personality to become instant celebrities (and, with luck, score big endorsement deals). But their constant training since learning to walk has turned most of them into no-fun workaholics, scarcely able to complete a coherent sentence.
And even when events are playing (taped hours before and edited in such a way as to destroy a game’s natural pacing), the announcers do everything possible to create a “feel-good” narrative storyline that’ll appeal to 18-35 female viewers who don’t normally watch sports.
That means U.S. competitors are often billed as the “stars,” whether in real contention or not.
It means events that are supposed to appeal to the target audience (gymnastics, swimming, women’s track and field) get priority time and attention, while others are left in obscurity.
It also means the technical, less-flashy elements of a sport are ignored whenever possible, in favor of highlight-reel spectacle moments.
Compare and contrast, meanwhile, to the CBC coverage, which has drawn cult followings in U.S. border towns such as Seattle and among big-dish satellite subscribers.
CBC does play a lot of attention to its country’s competitors; but since there are far fewer of them, it means the channel shows long stretches of field hockey, water polo, and many other NBC-unfavorite sports that happen to have a strong Canadian entrant.
CBC’s lower-budgeted coverage relies more heavily on the international-feed video, which emphasizes straightforward, no-nonsense coverage. To this footage, the Canadian network adds announcers who not only know the sports they’re covering, they assume their viewers care about the sports too.
And because it encourages its viewers to care about the games themselves, rather than just the instant celebrities, CBC isn’t afraid to show them live. This year, that means afternoon events in Sydney air in prime time in Toronto (late afternoon out here). Evening events in Sydney air late-night in Pacific Time, in the wee hours in the east.
NBC could’ve done this with its pair of subsidiary cable channels, but apparently couldn’t get over the “this is the way we’ve always done it” syndrome. The result: Anemic ratings and widespread disinterest; while the CBC broadcasters are becoming the games’ real heroes to those Americans capable of receiving them.
We’re probably seeing the end of the Olympic Games, as American television viewers have known them. The mass audience NBC wants can’t be corralled in by human-interest pap anymore because it doesn’t exist anymore. The next games could be covered on a broadcast channel with highlight shows (that don’t pretend to be more than highlight shows), on cable with live coverage of events with an adequate audience draw, and on the Net with unedited, multiple streaming-video feeds of everything. (Yes, even the Modern Pentathlon.)
In the post-mass-market age, nobody cares about media products packaged for people who don’t care. In sports coverage, you’ve gotta find, nurture, and build niche audiences among people who know and care about the particular sports being covered.
In the case of the Olympics, if you aggregate enough niche audiences for all the component sports, you could still have something.
TOMORROW: Web content as shareware.
ELSEWHERE:
