NBC's bungling of Wimbledon coverage "not a good omen" for Sochi Olympics

NBC's bungling of Wimbledon coverage "not a good omen" for Sochi Olympics

This article from Business Insider has some rather ominous news for those of us worried about how Olympics coverage will be handled in the US. Summary: NBC Sports won't air some of the most anticipated matches of Wimbledon live and won't let any of their broadcast/streaming partners do it either. This portends badly for its upcoming Olympics coverage, and puts into doubt promises of improvement from NBC's new bosses at Comcast.

Having tried to follow Wimbledon both online and on TV, I can confirm everything that article says about the Sharapova match. And it's actually worse than the article says. The article implies that between NBC and ESPN, the Nadal/Murray match will be covered live. This turned out not to be the case. NBC refused to let ESPN or its on line stream show any of the Nadal/Murray match, which started well before NBC's Wimbledon broadcast at 12 noon. Thank god for pirated streams online, or I'd have been unable to watch all the most important matches of Wimbledon live.

This portends very ill, very ill indeed for how NBC will handle Sochi, where figure skating will take place in an even less friendly timezone to TV broadcast. The time to start complaining about NBC Sports coverage is now. The fossils running NBC Sports are extremely obstinate, thus it will probably take years and ongoing avalanches of fan outrage to get them to budge. So it doesn't matter if you're not into tennis, or whatever sport they screw up next. If you see some fan protest going on, try to join in.

They need to stop living in 1980. The times have LONG changed.

I don't really think fans' outrage will change NBC's pursuit of maximizing their profits. That's what business people do. Prime time TV is a money making enterprise for sports. The sponsors want ratings. Who among the boards of figure skating fans actually watch it? and are there enough to satisfy the possible sponsors without casual fans? Are casual fans only interested if there are Americans-favored-to-win?

However, I don't know why Cycling gets a full turn of presentation on Universal Sport. Just how many casual fans are interested? To me, it does not become interesting until the last mile, same with NASCAR.

I think UniSport will carry figure skating, maybe not live, but in sort of reruns. Problem with that I won't see most of the finishing skaters. C'est la vie.

NBC has always sucked at covering the Olympics. And with me being on the west coast i will never see live figure skating at the Winter Olympics. Perfect example was Vancouver which is in the same time zone as me and yet it all all taped.

Sadly this has been a problem with them for DECADES, but it's actually worse now than ever before. I agree with Joe that this will not change any time soon. Regarding their coverage of Wimbledon, much of the problems lies with the immense profitability of the TODAY show. It's such a huge money maker for NBC, that the powers that be would never dream of preempting it for a whole week in order to air live coverage nationwide. Believe me, I've written several angry emails trying to make my point and never got anywhere with them. Now that the stupid chatfest is an obscene four hours long, things are actually worse than they were in the 80's and 90's. It's actually something of a victory that the fourth hour is scrapped Monday through Wednesday of the second week of the tournament. Still, b/c NBC insists on getting all its ad revenue from the first three hours nationwide, you end up with this inane 10 AM in all time zones malarkey. So if you're on the east coast like me, the transition is relatively seamless. But if you are in another time zone, you get progressively screwed the further west you go. As far as the semis go, this sudden switch to airing coverage at noon rather than 10 AM is utterly absurd. I was once again reduced to missing the second ladies semi aired live and had to follow the scores online instead. All so NBC could get it's full supply of TODAY in and some useless local news. Fortunately the men's semis were not a complete loss on the east coast due the length of the Djokovic-Tsonga match. Still, it's a pain and I would be absolutely miserable if I lived further west.

BTW, on a side note, this is not entirely an NBC issue. It's more of a network-TV-is-stuck-in-another-century issue. As an example, CBS consistently breaks into its weekday coverage of the US Open on Labor Day and the following Friday for 30 minutes of local news in many of the large markets. I can't tell you how many matches I've missed chunks of over the years because of this. Also, when I lived in NC in the 90s I was forced to miss half to two thirds of Super Saturday because the Open was preempted for local coverage of two ACC college football games. This was before live internet scoring, so I was totally in the dark as to what was happening. This usually meant I missed all but the last couple of games of the women's final and the first men's semi. On top of it all, they didn't even re-air or tape delay what they cut out in the middle of the night. As someone who treats tennis as a religion, it was total agony. But sadly in football crazy NC, that obnoxious practice made good business sense. So I can't imagine that NBC will do things any differently in three years when prime events happen to coincide once more with the Today show.

I saw as much of Wimbledon as my time allowed. I did not miss anything, and I mean a single serve unless I was busy and did not have time to watch.

It was all on TV, much of it Live on ESPN a well as NBC. I have Direct TV and they had a menu with 4-6 matches Live going on which I could choose from.
Better coveage I can't imagine.

I can only hope for the day figure skating will get such good and complete coverage. :sheesh:

^^^^
Tennis has a much larger fan base than figure skating. The networks make money! In the USA, it doesn't even need a an American top player. Maybe the Williams sisters, but I doubt it.

Tennis fans will be pleased to hear that starting next year, ESPN will be taking over coverage of the ENTIRE Wimbledon tournament and plans to air all matches live:

http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Special-Content/Wimbledon-To-ESPN.aspx

Apparently ABC will also air some coverage on tape on weekend afternoons.

BTW, on a side note, this is not entirely an NBC issue. It's more of a network-TV-is-stuck-in-another-century issue. As an example, CBS consistently breaks into its weekday coverage of the US Open on Labor Day and the following Friday for 30 minutes of local news in many of the large markets. I can't tell you how many matches I've missed chunks of over the years because of this. Also, when I lived in NC in the 90s I was forced to miss half to two thirds of Super Saturday because the Open was preempted for local coverage of two ACC college football games. This was before live internet scoring, so I was totally in the dark as to what was happening. This usually meant I missed all but the last couple of games of the women's final and the first men's semi. On top of it all, they didn't even re-air or tape delay what they cut out in the middle of the night. As someone who treats tennis as a religion, it was total agony. But sadly in football crazy NC, that obnoxious practice made good business sense. So I can't imagine that NBC will do things any differently in three years when prime events happen to coincide once more with the Today show.

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That's the (nasty) dark side of network sports coverage. I used to absolutely detest the trend we're currently seeing of big sporting events migrating to cable, but there is a huge benefit to such a move: you won't get pre-empted by local coverage, national news, etc. during an ESPN or Golf Channel telecast. (I understand some niche cable systems may send out announcements, etc., but that's beside the point.)

The network's handling of Wimbledon doesn't bode well for the Olys, but hopefully as more traditionally tape-delayed events go live, the pressure will mount on NBC to scrap this antiquated model.

R.D. said:

The network's handling of Wimbledon doesn't bode well for the Olys, but hopefully as more traditionally tape-delayed events go live, the pressure will mount on NBC to scrap this antiquated model.

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That's very true, but Figure Skating is losing many fans each year. This has to be dealt with by the figure skating organizations. NBC is under no obligation to show any figure skating competitions without sponsors support.

There are many sports that are shown only once per year on major networks. With its declining fan base why should Figure skating be any different?

Thanks for posting this. I'm cautiously optimistic and keeping my fingers crossed. It will be a bit weird after a lifetime of watching the finals on the same network, but it'll be well worth it. Plus the less Ted Robinson I have to listen to, the better. (Although, with Dick Enberg leaving ESPN, I hope they don't try to scoop Robinson as a replacement play-by-play man. He's awful.)

I actually do not mind taped events. Olympic coverage going well into the night (Gymnastics 2008) is geting so old.

For what it's worth, NBC is now claiming they will show all Olympic events live "on some platform." Of course, it may be a platform we have to pay for...
Bet they're really hoping PC doesn't win today...

ESPN has outbid NBC and signed a new 12 year deal with Wimbeldon.

ESPN is broadcasting Live every minute of evey game of the Women's World Cup.

Perhaps in the future ESPN will make a move for the Grand Prix series. ESPN broadcasts so many different sports it's almost hard to believe the way have shunned skating. But ESPN is not in business to lose money and pehaps they find dealing with Speedy too unpleasant.

MissIzzy said:

For what it's worth, NBC is now claiming they will show all Olympic events live "on some platform." Of course, it may be a platform we have to pay for...
Bet they're really hoping PC doesn't win today...

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That could mean the Summer Olympics. They must have gotten a lot flack with their coverage last year. The left out the Men's Decathalon.

As for Prime Time, I don't think it is all that important anymore. Cable is doing quite well.

Jammers said:

NBC has always sucked at covering the Olympics. And with me being on the west coast i will never see live figure skating at the Winter Olympics. Perfect example was Vancouver which is in the same time zone as me and yet it all all taped.

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There was a group of adult skaters tooling around the internet finding live feeds of ALL skaters from Britain, France, Turkey, Russia and posting links on Facebook walls until the feed was overloaded and we went searching for the next one. It was kind of fun and I think we might have missed 1-2 skaters/teams per event. We'll probably do the same for Sochi.