The #Nbcfail Olympics: Access, Liveness and the Public Interest

JPTV 1 (1) pp. 121–128 Intellect Limited 2013 Journal of Popular Television Volume 1 Number 1 © 2013 Intellect Ltd Olympic Dossier. English language. doi: 10.1386/jptv.1.1.121_1 Myles McNutt University of Wisconsin-Madison the #NBCFail Olympics: Access, liveness and the public interest ABstrACt KeywOrds This article explores the deeper meanings within social media criticism of NBC’s Olympic Games coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games, focusing on the divide between broadcasting those social media users and what NBC perceives as their audience for prime- liveness time, tape-delayed broadcasts. While viewer frustration has been dismissed as a public interest selfish desire for instant gratification in an era of conspicuous consumption, it also NBC demonstrates the complicated relationship between NBC’s broadcasting strategies Twitter and liveness, which creates concerns over access. Similarly, although viewer frustration has been positioned in opposition to the economic imperative of commercial broadcasting, it seems necessary to engage with the notion of the public interest in the light of NBC’s broadcast history and the nationalized appeal of the Olympic Games. In their rush to characterize #NBCFail as evidence of Twitter’s mob mentality, analysts fail to ask what this backlash might mean for the Olympics’ place within the larger spectrum of broadcast programming in the post-network era, and for NBC’s responsibility to viewers when it comes to this global event (and broadcasting in general). 121 JPTV_1.1_McNutt_121-128.indd 121 2/8/13 10:01:40 AM Myles McNutt When NBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Opening Ceremonies began, the latter had already ended. The tape-delayed broadcast allowed for inserted commercial breaks, excised segments (so as to fit into a single three-hour block in prime time) and an expedited parade of nations (with some countries earning only a few seconds of air time), on the whole delivering a broadcast that best suited the prime-time, nationwide audience in the eyes of the network. This kind of tape-delayed broadcast is standard issue with NBC’s Olympic broadcasting strategies in recent years, but this year was different. As the first Olympics outside of North America in the era where social media is decidedly ‘mainstream’, anyone who spent time on Twitter or Facebook on the afternoon in question could see their friends’ tweets and status updates about an Opening Ceremony that they could not see until hours later. While some of these friends could be in the United Kingdom, or elsewhere overseas, they could even be close to home: CTV, the primary Olympics broadcaster in Canada, chose to air the Opening Ceremonies live during the afternoon. NBC’s choice to air the Opening Ceremonies on tape-delay served as the first bellwether moment for the #NBCFail hashtag, a Twitter meme that gained considerable steam after mainstream outlets picked up on the growing discontent. It would prove a versatile term for responding to NBC’s blanket strategy of saving marquee events in swimming and track and field for tape- delayed, highlights-style prime-time broadcasts where advertising revenues would be higher. The perils of this temporal displacement were most clearly captured during a prime-time broadcast in which NBC aired a commercial promoting the appearance of 100m backstroke gold medallist Missy Franklin on the Today show (1952–) before they showed her winning the race in question (Yomtov 2012). While the media picked up on this and other gaffes, their discussion of #NBCFail often failed to ask larger questions about the nature of this viewer frustration. In a collection of articles pushing back against social media criticism, writers from Variety (Wallenstein 2012), The Hollywood Reporter (Goodman 2012) and CNN (Bark 2012) defend NBC’s decisions as logical and business-oriented. However, in doing so they portray those using the hashtag to criticize NBC’s coverage as ‘tweeters [who] don’t want to wait even extra seconds for [information]’ (Bark 2012), while sports journalist Will Leitch seeks to educate ignorant Twitter users regarding the fact that ‘NBC is in the business of making money. You know this, right?’ (Leitch 2012). In this article, I will explore the deeper meanings within criticisms of NBC’s coverage, and in this divide between social media users and what NBC perceives as their audience for prime-time broadcasts. While viewer frustration has been dismissed as a selfish desire for instant gratification in an era of conspicuous consumption, it also demonstrates the complicated relationship between NBC’s broadcasting strategies and liveness, which are limited by concerns over access. Similarly, although viewer frustration has been positioned in opposition to the economic imperative of commercial broadcasting, it seems necessary to engage with the notion of the public interest in the light of NBC’s broadcast history and the nationalized appeal of the Olympic Games. In their rush to characterize #NBCFail as evidence of Twitter’s mob mentality, analysts fail to ask what this backlash might mean for the Olympics’ place within the larger spectrum of broadcast programming in the post-network era, and for NBC’s responsibility to viewers when it comes to this global event (and broadcasting in general). 122 JPTV_1.1_McNutt_121-128.indd 122 2/8/13 10:01:40 AM The #NBCFail Olympics ACCess, CONtrOlled NBC’s coverage of the London Olympics took three forms: daily coverage of certain live events across NBC Universal’s collection of broadcast and cable channels (NBC, MSNBC, Bravo, NBC Sports), live online streaming of nearly all events on NBCOlympics.com, and a three-hour prime-time broadcast which focused primarily on marquee events (swimming, diving and track and field most prominently). On the surface, it appears to offer something for everyone: cable subscribers could enjoy all-day coverage featuring a wide range of sports (including channels devoted to showing live soccer, boxing and tennis), diehard followers could choose to stream any sport or event of their choosing online, while more casual viewers could tune in during the evenings and catch the most talked-about events (albeit after much of the rest of the world had talked about them). In this division, NBC targets three different sectors of its potential audience. On cable, NBC appeals to people who generally watch sports on television: it is not a coincidence that the three sports given their own channels are sports with existing broadcasting traditions in the US market. Online, mean- while, NBC hopes to appeal to the tech-savvy viewers who are active social media users and worried about having results spoiled. Finally, the prime-time broadcast focuses on a mass audience that may not always watch sports, but treats the Olympics as a larger media event to be consumed every two years. These different platforms demonstrate NBC’s adoption of post-network logics of narrowcasting and technological convergence in their programming strategies (Lotz 2007, Jenkins 2006), responding to changes in the industry with changes in how the Olympics are distributed to viewers. The presence of live streaming within this model would suggest that concerns over tape-delay were overblown, but the liveness of NBC’s online streams comes with conditions. Streams of events that would be featured during the prime-time broadcasts – and only streams of those events – could only be watched live as they happened, without the ability to pause (in case you have to go to the bathroom) or watch an archived version of the stream later in the day (in case you do not have an hour in the middle of the work day to sit in front of a computer and watch swimming). NBC’s online streaming site was also limited in two important ways: not only would the necessity for high Internet bandwidth – or smart phones and tablets with data plans capa- ble of streaming media – exclude some potential viewers, but NBC’s site also required you to log in through your cable provider, meaning cord cutters – or those unable to afford cable – would be unable to experience any Olympic events live. Jane Feuer’s now definitive ‘The Concept of Live Television’ argues that ‘notions of “liveness” lend a sense of flow which overcomes extreme frag- mentation of space’, which allows programming like the Olympic Games to ‘insinuate itself into our lives’ (Feuer 1983: 19). Remarking on how new technology of instant replay and computer graphics have changed live broadcasting, Feuer even mentions the 1980 Olympics, arguing that ‘anyone who watched […] had to be aware that the idea of an event happening once is no longer a part of this highly packaged occasion’ (Feuer 1983: 15, emphasis in original). However, Feuer also asks an important question: ‘must the real spec- tator assume the position the text structures for him/her?’ (Feuer 1983: 19). In the case of NBC’s prime-time Olympics coverage, viewers were positioned as though they were experiencing these events for the first time, despite the fact 123 JPTV_1.1_McNutt_121-128.indd 123 2/8/13 10:01:41 AM Myles McNutt that local news broadcasts, Internet news sites and social media updates could have already revealed the results. Feuer suggests that we consider television as ‘constituted by a dialectic of segmentation and flow’ (Feuer 1983: 15), and NBC’s coverage strategy calls direct attention to the former: the #NBCFail hashtag was in part a response to the segmentation of the viewing audience, revealing not simply the fact that liveness was being mediated – which is itself uneventful – but also that access to that liveness was being limited by factors beyond simply a time delay. In other words, the concern with NBC’s coverage is not that it was not entirely live, but rather that said coverage actively constrained liveness in order to manufacture an audience for its prime-time broadcast.

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