This summer’s London Olympic games will represent “a monumental experiment for network television in the digital age,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
Network executives at NBC are using a new formula, providing cable and satellite subscribers with live online content.
Including NBC’s cable channels and the online content, the network plans to broadcast 5,535 hours of Olympics coverage, “about 2,000 hours more than the Beijing games and compared with a total of 14 hours from the 1964 Tokyo games,” notes the article.
Choosing to broadcast so many live events online could be a risky move for NBC. “At stake is the billions of dollars NBC paid for U.S. broadcast rights and hundreds of millions in advertising revenues in an audacious bet that viewers will still come to the network at prime time,” explains WSJ.
The network’s hope is that chatter over social networks will fuel viewership, creating an environment in which people want to see the action for themselves during prime time re-runs.
And that hope is a very possible reality in this current, connected climate. “NBC confronts a very different world from Mr. Ebersol’s time. In the last four years, Facebook has grown to more than 900 million subscribers from 100 million, while Twitter has grown from near-nothing to more than 140 million active users tweeting some 340 million messages a day,” according to WSJ.
This summer’s London Olympic games will represent “a monumental experiment for network television in the digital age,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
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