One billion dollars of advertising to recoup is a lot of advertising. All of this without any acknowledgment of the 12 hour time difference, and, moreover, a global media which people have become accustomed to accessing without corporate controls. To prime its advertising revenue (basically to conform an all day event across the world into its age-old standard programming format of “prime time” and late-night slots) NBC decided to delay the broadcast of the opening ceremony—and much of the events—12 hours. Anyone who uses the internet for their news and sometimes media knows what happened. People figured out ways to view the events live, finding foreign feeds that had not been IP blocked as they should have been, forming ad-hoc blog and Twitter communities telling eachother how to hack the IP system or where to find unlicensed videos, which the NBC team of computer experts and lawyers chased after, sending out hundreds of thousands of take-down notices. Basically, once again, corporations made ad hoc communities of hackers out of their prime audience.

NBC are idiots.

We can only imagine the different paradigm of broadcasting that would have been given to us if Google were given the Olympics’ contract. NBC’s complete failure to understand the new paradigm is staggering. The live-ness of the broadcast is their only commodity. Recycling, delaying, copying, and commentating is something that everyone with a laptop can now do and access ubiquitously. But, for me, it having been years since I watched an Olympics broadcast, and having taken all my broadcast media from the internet the past few years, I was stunned by the antiquity of NBC’s broadcast paradigm. They seemed to beg you at every moment to turn off the TV and go searching the internet. The cacophony of boring commentators, the real dearth of camera perspectives and contextual footage, and the constant manipulative delay of events to make room for advertising, as if I couldn’t, with little effort, step around their broadcaster information dams and find out what I want… it was infuriating and reminiscent of watching my grandfather operate the remote control. What people want now is access to multiple perspectives, Live-ness, instantaneity, and a network of different commentators and communities.

It is worth noting that most of the European broadcasters—because the contractors were largely public television stations less committed to the broadcast advertising economic model—instead streamed the games live and then placed limits on this streaming so that only people in their own country (or international hackers) could access the video streams.  It seems that large corporation broadcasting—like many corporate dinosaurs—may go extinct as a result of this digital change, but public broadcasting, with its open-access ideology, is well suited to survive.