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Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

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Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#3

Post by pavel_lishin »

therealarmen wrote: post #2

I understand the frustration, but NBC is just trying to optimize for primetime viewers so they can extract maximum advertising dollars. They paid over $1 billion dollars for the right to broadcast the Olympics and now they must recoup that investment.

I want to say that they just found a local optimum, and that they're sacrificing long-term viewership for a short-term profit.

But who am I kidding? Nobody's going to stop watching NBC permanently because they won't air the olympics in a timely manner.

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#4

Post by pasbesoin »

Between NBC's behavior (and I'm recalling the unwatchability of the winter [CENSORED] two years ago, as well), the branding bullshit (including special, specific protective legislation), the outsourcing and outsourcing fiascos, and several other things I've already managed to consciously forget, I've already made my decision. I will not seek out one second of coverage.

Sportsmanship left the venue, if not always the specific athletes, a long time ago.

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#5

Post by mattbirchler »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #3
therealarmen wrote: post #2

I understand the frustration, but NBC is just trying to optimize for primetime viewers so they can extract maximum advertising dollars. They paid over $1 billion dollars for the right to broadcast the Olympics and now they must recoup that investment.

I want to say that they just found a local optimum, and that they're sacrificing long-term viewership for a short-term profit. But who am I kidding? Nobody's going to stop watching NBC permanently because they won't air the olympics in a timely manner.

Exactly. People are not going to stop watching NBC because of this. It's really not a big deal to most people. Most people want to be able to come home from work and watch the biggest events of the day.

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#7

Post by kitsune_ »

kevinburke wrote: post #6

Like many people here I would like to believe that the state of the world that ensures the highest profits and the state of the world that makes the most people happy are one and the same. I am coming to think that isn't true.

How could that ever be true? As an example: most people would prefer everything to be free, and a company would like to have a monopoly on a necessity and thus the ability to charge arbitrary prices.

Or even shorter, everyone wants to get stuff, lots of stuff without having to lift a finger.

Out of this, every company-customer relationship has to be dysfunctional.

The idea that the economy is a perfectly fair system where everyone profits equally in a transaction is a fairy tale. It completely ignores the imbalances of power inherent in social systems. In a perfectly free market, imbalances of power will be compounded over time, similar to the theory of the big bang where small imperfections of the early universe are fundamental to the large structures that follow.

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#8

Post by [deleted] »

kitsune_ wrote: post #7
kevinburke wrote: post #6

Like many people here I would like to believe that the state of the world that ensures the highest profits and the state of the world that makes the most people happy are one and the same. I am coming to think that isn't true.

How could that ever be true? As an example: most people would prefer everything to be free, and a company would like to have a monopoly on a necessity and thus the ability to charge arbitrary prices. Or even shorter, everyone wants to get stuff, lots of stuff without having to lift a finger. Out of this, every company-customer relationship has to be dysfunctional. The idea that the economy is a perfectly fair system…

[deleted]

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#9

Post by _delirium »

mattbirchler wrote: post #5
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to say that they just found a local optimum, and that they're sacrificing long-term viewership for a short-term profit. But who am I kidding? Nobody's going to stop watching NBC permanently because they won't air the olympics in a timely manner.

Exactly. People are not going to stop watching NBC because of this. It's really not a big deal to most people. Most people want to be able to come home from work and watch the biggest events of the day.

I agree as far as the delay goes, but I think they're handling the spoilers badly. A lot of people are annoyed that they went to http://www.nbcolympics.com/ to find a broadcast schedule, or watched the NBC News before the Olympic broadcast, and were told the results of stuff that hadn't aired yet.

An option could be to double down on the tape delay, and uniformly embargo results until the airing: pretend that when something airs on NBC is when it really happens, at least for NBC-property purposes.

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