NBC has gotten kudos for its unprecedented decision to show nearly every Olympics event live, either online or on TV.
But when Friday’s opening ceremony kicks off London 2012 at 9 p.m. local time (that’s 4 p.m. ET), don’t scour for the torch lighting or parade of athletes on NBC, or MSNBC, or Bravo, or CNBC or NBC Sports or even NBCOlympics.com.
NBC will be waiting until prime time on both Eastern and Pacific time on Friday to show the opening ceremony. For West Coast viewers, that means no access to the festivities until 6 ½ hours after they actually began. U.S. audiences will experience a similar delay for the closing ceremony Aug. 12.
“We are live streaming every sporting event, all 32 sports and 302 medals,” said Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics. “It was never our intent to live stream the Opening Ceremony or Closing Ceremony.”
Mr. Zenkel also said the opening ceremony is not a sporting event with a score or a winner that is difficult to keep secret, but rather an entertainment spectacle that should be seen by family and friends gathered around the TV in prime-time hours.
Amid the rise of DVRs, online video streaming and other technologies that allow people to make their own programming schedules, NBC took heat during the past couple of Olympics for holding back high-profile events to air them in the U.S. evenings, when viewership and ad dollars are at their highest. Predictably, then, there has been some grousing online about NBC’s decision to air the not-so-live opening ceremony.
“So, it’s tape delay of Paul’s performance for us,” wrote Twitter user Barb Potter, apparently a big fan of Paul McCartney, the headliner for Friday’s opening ceremony.
Not all of NBC’s partners are going along with the delayed opening ceremony. Twitter, which is among the digital companies teaming up with NBC for Olympics coverage, is kicking off an Olympics events page that will pull in tweets from athletes, their families, fans and others. The Twitter page will be live during the opening ceremony, no doubt giving a glimpse at athlete and fan reactions and photos from inside London’s Olympic Stadium.
NBC’s Mr. Zenkel has said he knows people are going to turn to services such as Twitter for an unvarnished look at the Games, and the Comcast Corp. unit plans to seed links to stoke excitement for TV viewing.
“They are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context,” said Mr. Zenkel. “We will be providing clips and highlights of each ceremony online so viewers know what to look forward to in prime time on NBC.”
The Daily Fix
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