And the gold goes to... the Canadian broadcaster by Kate Taylor
Source : Globe & Mail
August 25, 2008
Well, they may have beaten us in the medal counts but we did better on Olympic TV coverage. So there.
If it is a competition in national pride - and apparently it is - Canada can pat itself on the back that its Olympic broadcaster is higher, swifter and stronger than the U.S. one.
Or perhaps that is the wrong sports metaphor: CBC is more like the gymnast winning a series of 8s and 8.5s for style and form. With Michael Phelps in the pool every night in the first week of the games, NBC has been trumpeting record-breaking ratings, while CBC was averaging a healthy 1.3 million viewers in prime time, but not always knocking the dance shows and dramas from their top spots. It is a contest of quality that the CBC has won, broadcasting a greater range of sports, doing more scheduling for West Coast viewers, and generally appearing more nimble in getting from pool to track to riding ring than NBC. (Meanwhile, the Canadian network also orchestrated a smooth handover from prime-time host Ron MacLean to replacement Scott Russell in the final days of the Games, when the veteran sportscaster had to return to Canada because his mother had died.)
True, NBC's coverage is less painfully mawkish than it used to be and the network bent over backward to show a sportsmanlike attitude toward Chinese athletes who were beating Americans, but it still depends on a great deal of sentimental, pre-packaged content.
If the CBC's athlete profiles show some nodding acquaintance with journalism, NBC produces bizarre bits of cheerleading in that category.
I watched an item about diver Laura Wilkinson narrated entirely by the Sydney gold medalist herself and in which she described her quest for a second medal at age 30 in defiant language that had clearly been scripted for her as though she were a contestant on a reality show. Even host Bob Costas looked a bit taken aback by the tone when he came back on camera, and Wilkinson's disappointing ninth place finish (in the competition in which Canadian Emilie Heymans won silver) only made her comments seem more unfortunate.
These differences in tone don't go unnoticed in the United States. American bloggers complaining about NBC often recommend the CBC to each other, and one California television writer awarded the Canadian broadcaster gold while asking if NBC even deserved a medal at all. Of course, none of these criticisms hurt NBC in the only place it cares about: With Phelps's swims scheduled to appear in East Coast prime time, the network was top of the ratings heap night after night in the first week of the games. (The overall ratings for the second week will be available this week.) NBC's ratings underline the extent to which the old-fashioned networks can still provide the hearth around which the community gathers. Similarly, in Canada, CBC viewership peaked when 2.6 million people tuned in to watch Simon Whitfield win the silver medal in the triathlon last Monday.
On the other hand, the Olympics, especially the Olympics in a time zone 12 hours away, can make the networks look like lumbering beasts. American viewers on the West Coast complained vociferously that NBC kept the "live" logo up on the screen on events that had been shown live in the East but were tape-delayed by the time they got to run prime time in the West. On the CBC, MacLean often led off his prime-time broadcasts with coy pointers to the results of events that had taken place hours before: We were told there was "good news" from the equestrian events but not that Ian Millar had won silver.
Of course, viewer demands are varied and contradictory. While the blogosphere was rife with complaints about NBC's tape delays, some subscribers to a CCN news alert were outraged when they received news of Usain Bolt's win in the 100 metres hours before it was going to air on television. Well, do you want to live in the plugged-in, 24/7 digital universe or don't you?
In truth, we are at a transitional moment in television and the Olympics underline its tensions. The games bring to TV a mass audience that may not watch much sports the rest of the time - NBC is playing to a crowd it assumes has shallow knowledge with its focus on a few popular sports and its pre-packaged storytelling - alongside a whole range of rabid and often highly knowledgeable niche audiences for specific sports. Everyone I spoke to or read online in the past two weeks had a different complaint. When is NBC going to get out of the pool? CBC has too few cameras to provide competent soccer coverage. You call synchronized diving a sport? Why do they air softball? Why do they only show clips of softball not entire games?
To some extent these tastes are catered to by the specialty channels - CBC ran the equestrian events and sailing on the digital channel Bold, while TSN has aired soccer and volleyball games in their entirety as well as boxing and wrestling. And to some extent people can find what they need on websites: CBC.ca was reporting about 250,000 live-stream and 700,000 on-demand downloads a day last week on a website that was getting almost three million page views a day, up from a mere million a week for the Athens Olympics.
But the on-demand videos are usually only brief clips of the events, and who really wants to be watching sports playing in one corner of the computer screen, especially at three in the morning? In the shiny digital future, there should be space on the spectrum for a larger and interactive Olympic offering, so that we can all sit in our comfy armchairs in front of flat-screen TVs picking and choosing from live and taped offerings of every Olympic sport in the pantheon ... at a price, of course.
Expect CBC to be a player in that world, despite continuing debate over whether a public broadcaster should cover an area of programming that commercial broadcasters are eager to take over. CBC may have been outbid by CTV for the 2010 Vancouver winter Olympics and the 2012 London summer Olympics, but this week it got approval to start a digital channel largely dedicated to amateur sport, a crucial building block for future bids. In 2010, CTV will profit from the local setting and a time difference that neatly catapults afternoon events into Eastern prime time, but it will also have to match a standard of Olympics coverage that has been set by the CBC.
© Globe and Mail
If it is a competition in national pride - and apparently it is - Canada can pat itself on the back that its Olympic broadcaster is higher, swifter and stronger than the U.S. one.
Or perhaps that is the wrong sports metaphor: CBC is more like the gymnast winning a series of 8s and 8.5s for style and form. With Michael Phelps in the pool every night in the first week of the games, NBC has been trumpeting record-breaking ratings, while CBC was averaging a healthy 1.3 million viewers in prime time, but not always knocking the dance shows and dramas from their top spots. It is a contest of quality that the CBC has won, broadcasting a greater range of sports, doing more scheduling for West Coast viewers, and generally appearing more nimble in getting from pool to track to riding ring than NBC. (Meanwhile, the Canadian network also orchestrated a smooth handover from prime-time host Ron MacLean to replacement Scott Russell in the final days of the Games, when the veteran sportscaster had to return to Canada because his mother had died.)
True, NBC's coverage is less painfully mawkish than it used to be and the network bent over backward to show a sportsmanlike attitude toward Chinese athletes who were beating Americans, but it still depends on a great deal of sentimental, pre-packaged content.
If the CBC's athlete profiles show some nodding acquaintance with journalism, NBC produces bizarre bits of cheerleading in that category.
I watched an item about diver Laura Wilkinson narrated entirely by the Sydney gold medalist herself and in which she described her quest for a second medal at age 30 in defiant language that had clearly been scripted for her as though she were a contestant on a reality show. Even host Bob Costas looked a bit taken aback by the tone when he came back on camera, and Wilkinson's disappointing ninth place finish (in the competition in which Canadian Emilie Heymans won silver) only made her comments seem more unfortunate.
These differences in tone don't go unnoticed in the United States. American bloggers complaining about NBC often recommend the CBC to each other, and one California television writer awarded the Canadian broadcaster gold while asking if NBC even deserved a medal at all. Of course, none of these criticisms hurt NBC in the only place it cares about: With Phelps's swims scheduled to appear in East Coast prime time, the network was top of the ratings heap night after night in the first week of the games. (The overall ratings for the second week will be available this week.) NBC's ratings underline the extent to which the old-fashioned networks can still provide the hearth around which the community gathers. Similarly, in Canada, CBC viewership peaked when 2.6 million people tuned in to watch Simon Whitfield win the silver medal in the triathlon last Monday.
On the other hand, the Olympics, especially the Olympics in a time zone 12 hours away, can make the networks look like lumbering beasts. American viewers on the West Coast complained vociferously that NBC kept the "live" logo up on the screen on events that had been shown live in the East but were tape-delayed by the time they got to run prime time in the West. On the CBC, MacLean often led off his prime-time broadcasts with coy pointers to the results of events that had taken place hours before: We were told there was "good news" from the equestrian events but not that Ian Millar had won silver.
Of course, viewer demands are varied and contradictory. While the blogosphere was rife with complaints about NBC's tape delays, some subscribers to a CCN news alert were outraged when they received news of Usain Bolt's win in the 100 metres hours before it was going to air on television. Well, do you want to live in the plugged-in, 24/7 digital universe or don't you?
In truth, we are at a transitional moment in television and the Olympics underline its tensions. The games bring to TV a mass audience that may not watch much sports the rest of the time - NBC is playing to a crowd it assumes has shallow knowledge with its focus on a few popular sports and its pre-packaged storytelling - alongside a whole range of rabid and often highly knowledgeable niche audiences for specific sports. Everyone I spoke to or read online in the past two weeks had a different complaint. When is NBC going to get out of the pool? CBC has too few cameras to provide competent soccer coverage. You call synchronized diving a sport? Why do they air softball? Why do they only show clips of softball not entire games?
To some extent these tastes are catered to by the specialty channels - CBC ran the equestrian events and sailing on the digital channel Bold, while TSN has aired soccer and volleyball games in their entirety as well as boxing and wrestling. And to some extent people can find what they need on websites: CBC.ca was reporting about 250,000 live-stream and 700,000 on-demand downloads a day last week on a website that was getting almost three million page views a day, up from a mere million a week for the Athens Olympics.
But the on-demand videos are usually only brief clips of the events, and who really wants to be watching sports playing in one corner of the computer screen, especially at three in the morning? In the shiny digital future, there should be space on the spectrum for a larger and interactive Olympic offering, so that we can all sit in our comfy armchairs in front of flat-screen TVs picking and choosing from live and taped offerings of every Olympic sport in the pantheon ... at a price, of course.
Expect CBC to be a player in that world, despite continuing debate over whether a public broadcaster should cover an area of programming that commercial broadcasters are eager to take over. CBC may have been outbid by CTV for the 2010 Vancouver winter Olympics and the 2012 London summer Olympics, but this week it got approval to start a digital channel largely dedicated to amateur sport, a crucial building block for future bids. In 2010, CTV will profit from the local setting and a time difference that neatly catapults afternoon events into Eastern prime time, but it will also have to match a standard of Olympics coverage that has been set by the CBC.
© Globe and Mail
