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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

#21

Post by _delirium »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #18
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.

Do... people... really believe this?

There's a certain pop-libertarianism that does take this Panglossian view that we live in a perfectly tuned universe, where market dynamics, unless interfered with by the state, always produce the best outcomes, recognizing value and allocating resources. It reminds me a bit of some new-agey environmentalism, which believes that ecosystems always work optimally in a harmonious balance, unless humans interfere with Nature's dynamics.

(To be fair, I would say most hardcore libertarian philosophy is based on natural-rights type views, and doesn't make arguments about maximizing outcomes at all.)

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

#22

Post by [deleted] »

_delirium wrote: post #9
mattbirchler wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

[deleted]

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

#23

Post by wtn »

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 could see this argument for a Tuesday, but who the Hell wants to watch TV on a Saturday night—especially when the events happened 5 hours (± whatever) earlier?

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

#25

Post by lkbm »

cvp wrote: post #10

Apparently the results of today's 400M Men's swimming individual medley were the lede for NBC Nightly News tonight... before NBC has even aired the race. Just when you thought they couldn't make things worse....

They live-tweeted the opening ceremonies, and today live tweeted events including that one.

I'm quite happy to see angry @replies. I don't anticipate them changing how they're doing things mid-games, but maybe they'll realize they made a mistake if every "Such and such just won the blank event!" gets multiple angry responses.

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

#26

Post by JonnieCache »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #18
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.

Do... people... really believe this?

If you believe, clap your hands and say, "I believe in the market economics fairy!"

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

#28

Post by majormajor »

Despite how many people on this site and sites like it don't have some kind of cable or satellite service... we're a pretty small minority. Especially when it comes to the group of people interested in watching sports, where live is king, and the online options suck unless you live out of your teams' TV markets. I'm not surprised they're not going out of their way to cater to us.

For all the "the model no longer works" comments: what's the proof? The number of people I know complaining about the model is dwarfed by the number of people I know who have cable and have been watching stuff on both TV and online all day long.

I've seen a lot of legitimate complaints about how they're handling the time shifting stuff (which, surprisingly to me, has mostly been along the lines of "it's too easy to find out what happened" instead of complaining about the time shifting in the first place), but I don't see a big hole in their delivery system. They don't want to give people less reason to have cable -- and for all the money they could possibly make broadcasting the Olympics for-pay to non-cable subscribers, that's just a couple weeks every couple of years. The real win for them is if you still want to maintain a cable subscription.

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

#29

Post by notJim »

> They’re doing this for a reason: m-o-n-e-y.

Uh, yeah. It's something you need in order to run a company. A company that employs people and gives them, guess what? m-o-n-e-y. And how does it do that, and how does it continue doing that? By being profitable, which it does by having (among other things) exclusive content and advertisers who want to be seen alongside that content.

But no, NBC should just put all their stuff online, where it's less clear what kind of profit they would make, because fuck them, this is the internet, and money is bad. We internet people can work at companies that don't have a business model or make a profit, so why can't everyone else?

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

#30

Post by melling »

dkrich wrote: post #14

Just a thought- NBC is a for-profit company. Because of that they are able to pay hundreds of millions for the rights to cover the Olympics. Because of that, they want the largest viewership. That occurs during primetime. If the tv industry is so "disruptable" as many keep saying, why hasn't it happened? Clearly people want the ability to watch as much shit, wherever, whenever they can, preferably for free. Apparentl…

I'm not sure why people don't get this. It's pretty obvious that companies need to make money, and that it's big business.

I haven't had a TV for almost 3 years and I suffer through missing out on lots of stuff. However, until the economics change (e.g. cable companies die) it's going to be like this for several more years. At least I got a real streaming Superbowl this year.

Rather than complain, let's change the economics and help to make the transition faster. Btw, http://justin.tv is a going place to start in a pinch. :-)

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