31–40 of 99 posts
I saw the 400 IM was on at 2:30pm today, so I turned on the tv to NBC - only to see yet another pointless interview with Ryan Seacrest (why is he doing sports coverage??). Had to watch a stream of the race live even though NBC was airing Olypmics coverage at the same time!
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.
That model no longer works in the modern age. Simply put, there is demand for viewing coverage of the olympics that is not being met, thus they are leaving money on the table. Unfortunately for them and for their potential customers they are constraining themselves to a business model that is obsolete. They are doing the equivalent of covering the olympics via newspaper in a television era. They need to provide live…
By making this stuff available online, the amount of money they can get for the primetime TV spots is reduced, because fewer people will watch the primetime stuff, and it has less cachet because it's no longer exclusive. They will recoup some of that loss by charging money for internet access and having ads on the internet stream, but the ads online will be even cheaper, because that's just how internet ads work. Not only that, but they have to have a platform that they can use to deliver and charge for this content at scale (they might already have such a platform, but it may not be up to this kind of scale, I'm honestly not sure.) So that costs money, too. It's likely the folks at NBC did this analysis and found that it didn't work out in their favor, or there was too much uncertainty.
Meanwhile, most people will be at worst annoyed by the lack of internet coverage, but they'll just record it on their DVRs, or miss out on an event here or there. A very small number of people will go the trouble of pirating it, but those people are likely a margin of error in the grand scheme of things.
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.
That model no longer works in the modern age. Simply put, there is demand for viewing coverage of the olympics that is not being met, thus they are leaving money on the table. Unfortunately for them and for their potential customers they are constraining themselves to a business model that is obsolete. They are doing the equivalent of covering the olympics via newspaper in a television era. They need to provide live…
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…
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…
Yesterday's discussion on HN had the price of broadcast rights at $1.1B, not including production costs. The tv industry is not disruptable. Content is expensive, and margins are not huge. People need to stop saying it is disruptable just because they are unhappy with it. There is a ton of inertia behind the entertainment market.
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…
We don't know how to make such a world exist. The claim is not, "if we could snap our fingers and make the world look like anything we wanted, the happiest world we could create would also be the world with the most massive profits". It's closer to, "if we want to optimise for happiness going forward from the world we have, then we should also optimise for allowing companies to make profits".
(Not to say I agree with the claim, but that particular argument is missing the point.)
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 work…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yesterday's discussion on HN had the price of broadcast rights at $1.1B, not including production costs. The tv industry is not disruptable. Content is expensive, and margins are not huge. People need to stop saying it is disruptable just because they are unhappy with it. There is a ton of inertia behind the entertainment market.
People saying an industry is disruptable, nine times out of ten, means that people want that industry to be disrupted -- not that such a disruption is easy or even feasible.