Fred Wilson’s tumblog post today led me to an extremely important article in the New York Times about how NBC is handling the Olympics in an age where the consumers are in charge more than the executives.
It turns out that although NBC tried their damnedest to keep the stunningly gorgeous opening ceremony under wraps for twelve hours while they prepped it for the “live” US prime time debut, they failed miserably.
More importantly, their utter failure to keep the scenes off You Tube did nothing to hurt their prime time viewership. In fact it might have helped—the Times article reports that a whopping 34.2 million viewers, an audience larger than that of any non-US opening in history.
What gives? Why did all these people, who already saw it for free, turn up in droves for the real broadcast?
UnDisruptive Technologies
David Carr rightly invokes the memory of VCRs and DVDs. When they first hit the market, the movie industry ran for their lives—how on earth would they survive if people could watch a movie as many times as they wanted?
Far from destroying Hollywood, however, video cassettes and DVDs have played a significant part in keeping the industry in growth since their introduction.
The lesson, as Carr puts it, is that:
Emerging technologies that threaten to destroy the current paradigm can have precisely the opposite effect.
I might alter that slightly to read:
Emerging technologies that threaten to destroy the current paradigm will often reveal new and unexpected opportunities.
The internet does, in ways that VHS and DVDs did not, actually alter the paradigm of media consumption. It is the first private, two-way, fully multimedia, broadcast medium. Paradigms don’t stand a chance.
In this case, however, YouTube clips acted like viral marketing for the full high-definition (or longer-than-ten-minutes) version of the Olympic opening ceremonies that aired at prime time. NBC, while in fact trying very hard not to, successfully leveraged the internet as a marketing tool to dramatically boost their viewership.
Moving Online
While standard TV may still offer some optimized experience that sitting at a computer does not, reading a physical newspaper is fast losing its allure. It’s hard to think of online news clips working as advertising for your print product.
News is a lean-forward product, and the internet is an ideal place for people to get it…on their own terms:
For the last few years, the locus of control has been shifting and consumers not only expect to customize their media experience, they demand it as a condition of engagement. The horizon line for when a newspaper on the street is serving as a kind of brochure of a rich online product does not seem far off.
(Unfortunately, the NYT did not link to me—I added that myself).
The internet is not a place to be scared of. It will destroy many of the systems that are currently in place, but in so doing, it will create new and unexpected sources of revenue for the savvy competitor.
NBC is sacrificing a lot of good will, free PR, and brand exposure by trying to stamp out the Olympics videos that people invariable want to share with each other.
Like oil before 1846, online news is everywhere, and nobody knows what to do with it. But that’s hardly the same thing as it being worthless.
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Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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