Yes, the Olympics’ TV ratings have wiped out like Bode Miller. But don’t blame the oddball winter sports, the time lag from Turin or the abrupt exit of skating diva Michelle Kwan.
The problem is, we were brought up to think of the Olympics as a mammoth event of the mass media. These days, it’s a rather large event delivered by an array of media at scattershot times. As with movies, music, television and the rest of the ever-expanding media culture, the day of the nation-riveting blockbuster is over.
Push has come to shove: It’s a “pull” media world, not a “push” one, in the parlance of media and technology experts. Translation: With a multitude of TV channels, satellite radio stations, digital recorders, cellphone downloads and subject- specific podcasts, people are pulling what entertainment they want, when and where they want it. The idea of sitting still for a long night of NBC’s selections has grown obsolete.
One clear indicator of that trend is the traffic on NBCOlympics.com. Instead of waiting for the prime-time broadcast, people are checking the Web during the day. NBC had delivered a record 7 million video streams as of Thursday. This is translating into cash: NBC’s Olympic guru Dick Ebersol says the network will make up to $6 million in pure profit from the online component, the first time the Olympics Internet content will turn a profit.
The Olympics on the Web are so popular they are outdrawing “American Idol,” a reverse from TV. IdolOnFox.com attracted 509,000 unique visitors last week, while NBCOlympics.com attracted 2.3 million.
“People watch ‘American Idol’ as a TV destination. The Olympics is something much larger than a television event,” said Jon Gibs, director of media research for Nielsen/NetRatings. “The Internet has turned out to be a really good way to get access.”
In the past two decades, media fragmentation has meant fewer people parking themselves in front of the TV to spend four hours with one network.
“Obviously there are issues with Michelle Kwan not showing up and Bode Miller not being as good a story as they thought,” he said. “But the broader trend is that the way this is programmed is not the way people are consuming TV anymore.”
Ebersol put it in context: “Are the Olympics off a bit? Yeah. But they are not off one iota from all the other major sports events and certainly not from the major glamour events like the Oscars and Grammys.”
Are Ebersol’s comments self- serving, a convenient excuse for disappointing Nielsen results? Of course. But he points to an essential truth: In the on-demand entertainment world, mainstream “event” programming is on the way out.
The Super Bowl, the year’s biggest television event, is the exception. On average, 80 million to 90 million Americans show up for the ritual.
Industry insiders suggest that when we ask what went wrong with the Olympics broadcasts from Turin, we’re asking the wrong question. The better question is, isn’t this part of the tectonic shift in the media that’s happened in the past several years?
“In today’s growing network and technological universe, no show – not even an event like the Olympics – should be expected to maintain audience levels from four and eight years ago,” according to Marc Berman, who writes Mediaweek’s Programming Insider. While the Turin Games are down 25 percent from the Nagano Games in 1998 and down 32 percent from the Salt Lake City Games in 2002, that’s largely because the universe has changed, too.
“As televised big-ticket events, the Olympics as we knew them in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s are fading fast,” wrote Ed Martin of Jack Myers Media Village. “Not even the contemporary razzle-dazzle of state-of- the-art camerawork and high- definition television can save them.”
Ebersol, NBC Universal Sports and Olympics chairman, notes the NBA finals, the World Series, Monday Night Football, the Oscars and the Grammys are all off by double digits.
Sitcom “events” are downsized, too. In 1998, the “Seinfeld” finale nabbed a 41 rating; last spring, the “Everybody Loves Raymond” finale scored a 20 rating. “That’s off 51 percent,” Ebersol said.
Even today’s wildly popular cultural obsessions may be less omnipresent than they seem. Everyone has an iPod, right? And everyone loves “The Sopranos” and Jon Stewart, this year’s Oscar host. In truth, only a small percentage of the population are invested in each. Jon who? To the majority of the country, Stewart will be the least-familiar emcee in Oscar history; his Comedy Central “Daily Show” averages only 1.4 million viewers.
Need more examples that there’s no such thing as “mass appeal” these days? Hip-hop culture is prominent in advertising, fashion and music, but the Country Music Awards clobbered the Vibe hip-hop music awards in head-to-head competition recently.
Movie theater attendance is down for the third straight year. More people are staying home while buying a bigger variety of music, books and DVDs rather than following narrow best-seller lists.
A study of audience fragmentation by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu concludes this splintering is a fact of life that media companies should exploit, not fear. Technological advances and increased disposable income make audience fragmentation inevitable, the analysts conclude, so why not cash in?
Tony Kern, managing partner of Deloitte’s technology, media and telecommunications division, said the telecast is “getting tired. … It’s difficult with anything so diverse, to have it pushed at you rather than letting you select what you might want, if you like the super-G or ice skating, for instance. The Olympics is like a smorgasbord of events, and you may not sit through it.”
Kern said NBC understands the changing universe, which is why it has spread the Olympic content across numerous platforms from which consumers can pull what they want.
“There are so many moving pieces now because of convergence,” Kern said. “Because of high-speed connectivity, we’re finally getting to convergence.”
While the ratings decline, NBC is content with the amount of money made from the Winter Games so far.
“We’re profitable,” Ebersol told a press conference call. “We see on these Games a profit between $50 (million) and $75 million,” along with that first-time profit on the Internet.
Clearly, there’s money to be made on the further splintering audience.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-820-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
