If the Olympics were to go against the NFL and NCAA football in late September/early October, as the OP suggested, NBC would be impacted negatively on two Saturdays, two Sundays, two Mondays and two Thursdays. On Saturday and Sunday, it would be up against football for the entire afternoon and the most lucrative selling hours of the evening. Not literally the end of the world, but certainly something the network would want to avoid doing if it weren't absolutely forced to by outside events. And do you really think advertisers would pony up as much for the Olympics later on the calendar knowing the competition for eyeballs would be much greater? If the advertisers were to pay the same for September Olympics as they now pay for July Olympics, you can bet that the make-goods NBC would have give those advertisers would haunt NBC halfway into the next year. Remember, gambling drives football viewing. Gamblers are making up a larger percentage of football viewers each season. Betting on the Olympics is a microscopic part of the legal gambling market in the U.S. Football will not move aside for the Olympics, so it's the Olympics have to avoid going head to head with American football to maximize profits for their U.S. TV partner (NBC) and its advertisers.
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NBC’s Paris Olympic coverage
- Thread starter Don CT
- Start date
Maybe 4 games would disrupt ratings. The majority of people don’t care if Baylor is playing east Oklahoma State.
Baylor vs. Oklahoma State would disrupt ratings in Oklahoma, for sure, and part of Texas. All the major conference football everywhere would impact them somehow -- except. of course, in New England, where most folks have no idea who big college football is in the Midwest, South, Southwest, Plains, and Pacific Northwest. No freaking idea. Add all those other games taking place on Saturday up against your game and you have a big problem, because so many folks away from New England, New York and New Jersey will watch their schools' games -- or other major-conference games -- instead of the Olympics.
The audiences are quite different, not a perfect or near perfect overlap. No one is saying they’re lobbying for any such thing to happen, but it’s not as if it’s an epic disaster. Plenty of people don’t watch the NFL and college football. Plenty do. But there’s room for two very different high profile events that are conducted and broadcast in very different ways.
Did the reduced time difference relative to PyongCheng, Beijing, and Tokyo have anything to do with it? How much live coverage was there from Vancouver 2010 and Rio 2016?
they get good ratings for meaningless glorified scrimmages, ratings MLB would love
Small language barrier for me there, David.
Which brings up something I have long wondered about. Why don't the major Spanish-language terrestrial networks offer English as secondary audio on their SAP channels, in a reversal of how Spanish secondary audio is available for many American shows on English-language networks? Thanks to the English captions, I used to love watching all the Asian dramas and assorted miscellany (anyone remember Iron Chef?) on KSCI-18 Los Angeles decades ago when they still imported Japanese and South Korean network television shows. One has to wonder how many English-only Hispanics (and otherwise) in the U.S. might become new viewers Univision's and Telemundo's programming if it provided English SAP tracks. (For yucks, I just now checked KVEA-52/Telemundo's Olympics coverage to see what, if anything, was present on the SAP channel. Turns out the station's second audio channel was carrying the same Spanish-language audio as its primary audio track, but just without an Optimod flattening all the dynamics. There must be a large Hispanic audiophile population in this town. )That would be nirvana.
Several years ago, I missed an entire MLB World Series, and wound up scouring bittorrent after the fact to see whether anyone had uploaded it so I could at least enjoy it post-telecast without the express, written permission of Major League Baseball.
Well, the only copy I found was some Russian one captured from a Russian satellite network, with "multi-language audio (Russian/English/Other)" promised in the torrent description. Taking a chance on the download, I discovered that it was in fact from some Russian satellite pay TV network -- a network that not only featured no locally-inserted (Russian) commercial breaks, but one that was getting their coverage from MLB International's official satellite feed ... whose audio multiplex this Russian network was lazily piping through "as is" to its subscribers, adding only one additional audio track to the mix that featured live Russian translators.
The other audio track options? English game audio with narration by the official MLB International announcers, and ... raw game audio without any narration whatsoever. Whoever recorded those games off that Russian network had apparently just dumped the channel's raw transport stream right into the .mkv files I was looking at.
So there I was, holding in my hands a complete World Series with my choice of non-hyped (non-Joe Buck, non-FOX) English narration, or, pure clean stadium audio ... and with the bonus of it coming with zero commercials, and having no cuts-to-black where the commercials would've gone otherwise. As in, you got to keep watching all the practice and warm-ups, with sound, happening on the field every time a break didn't come along, i.e. while the rest of the world was being told to buy cars, walk-in tubs, and KFC.
It was like reliving the unscrambled C-band backhaul days all over again. Why can't all television broadcasts be like this?!
Because television doesn’t cater to the few who whine about commentators.
Preferences you don't share aren't whining. And Joe Buck haters are legion.
There is a zen quality to seeing live, uninterrupted, unnarrated feeds of events like this. If more people were able to experience them, the phenomenon would catch on and there would be a demand for having them as an option. (Though personally I would never watch any Dodgers games without Vin Scully's voice, if he were still around to call them.
)"Most."
Remember how AM stations that carried live games (baseball, etc.) during the AM IBOC era frequently shut their IBOC sidebands off and went full analog to please fans? It was because certain fans attending those games in person were in the habit of bringing walkmans to the games so they could hear the game being called without any digital delay while watching it live and in person. Enough people were actually in the habit of doing this that their complaint volume vis-a-vis IBOC actually got stations to shut their IBOC encoders off whenever broadcasting a local sporting event.
Yet the number of fans attending all those games without ever bringing along radios with earbuds -- people fully content to hear the "clean feed" of the natural ambient stadium/game audio all around them -- was still the majority.
Among television audiences, I'd guess it wouldn't be most that would choose the clean feed, just 'cause people consider it traditional to have an announcer going on and on, adding excitement to the action while watching via broadcast TV. But I'm positive that a very large percentage of viewers would still, if given the chance, choose the clean audio feed.
Some people take their sports very seriously. One of the Joe Buck haters I once knew was a gigantic Giants fan. He lived in northern California within the signal footprint of the Giants' official AM sports station. Every time the Giants made it to the world series, this person would put Joe Buck/FOX on mute, and rig up a variable audio delay on the output of his AMAX-certified Carver AM tuner, all so he could listen to the games being announced, in perfect A/V sync with Fox, in the "proper" way, the way they "should" be announced. I always got a kick out of that. Talk about dedication.
Yet the number of fans attending all those games without ever bringing along radios with earbuds -- people fully content to hear the "clean feed" of the natural ambient stadium/game audio all around them -- was still the majority.
Among television audiences, I'd guess it wouldn't be most that would choose the clean feed, just 'cause people consider it traditional to have an announcer going on and on, adding excitement to the action while watching via broadcast TV. But I'm positive that a very large percentage of viewers would still, if given the chance, choose the clean audio feed.
Some people take their sports very seriously.
One of the Joe Buck haters I once knew was a gigantic Giants fan. He lived in northern California within the signal footprint of the Giants' official AM sports station. Every time the Giants made it to the world series, this person would put Joe Buck/FOX on mute, and rig up a variable audio delay on the output of his AMAX-certified Carver AM tuner, all so he could listen to the games being announced, in perfect A/V sync with Fox, in the "proper" way, the way they "should" be announced. I always got a kick out of that. Talk about dedication.As in the handful of perpetual complainers."Most."
Well the Olympics are about to be over and it's finals week. This is your chance to go inside the Peacock app and find some events which are all IOC feeds not dubbed with NBC Sports announcers. I can name some of them Field Hockey, skateboarding, Handball, Rugby, futbol, Judo, Fencing, Boxing, Wrestling, table tennis, Badminton, Weightlifting. Yes it's the feeds that don't have Team USA involved. The ones NBC Sports announcers are assigned to are the ones where Team USA stars are fighting for the gold medal. NBC knows when team USA stars are involved that's where majority of viewers are going to be at.
Scripps maintains lead on Top 10 list of most-watched NBC afiliates during Olympics
TEGNA has the highest number of top stations when the list expands to the 20 most-watched NBC affiliates, though only one station is in the top 10.
thedesk.net
Here is the current status on Olympic ratings on NBC. Note this data includes Hearst owned NBC affiliate WDSU New Orleans has the highest ratings per capita for the Olympics. Dang I was expecting Stations like KNTV, KNBC, WNBC, WRC, WMAQ to be on top of the list of NBC affiliates with the most Olympic viewers per capita.
I think the size of the markets you brought up has something to do with that, like we see when teams in the major cities play NFL primetime games, where the number isn't so high, even though I'm sure many were watching. I'd be curious to see how Phoenix (KPNX) did ratingswise considering they air Primetime in Paris out of the normal primetime pattern airing it at the same time as West Coast primetime. I'm sure it probably ate a bit away from the 10pm news ratings over on 3/5, 10, & 15.Scripps maintains lead on Top 10 list of most-watched NBC afiliates during Olympics
TEGNA has the highest number of top stations when the list expands to the 20 most-watched NBC affiliates, though only one station is in the top 10.
Here is the current status on Olympic ratings on NBC. Note this data includes Hearst owned NBC affiliate WDSU New Orleans has the highest ratings per capita for the Olympics. Dang I was expecting Stations like KNTV, KNBC, WNBC, WRC, WMAQ to be on top of the list of NBC affiliates with the most Olympic viewers per capita.
I've been watching boxing on Peacock for the past hour. No American fighters seen yet, but NBC has announcers there.
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