Olympics Onslaught: TV's Better

Written by R. Scott Raynovich - Light Reading

Monday, August 11. 2008 at 10:05 AM EDT Post a comment

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I returned from a business trip to the West Coast this weekend to be greeted by the onslaught of the Olympic media orgy. Has there ever been such a completely consuming media over-saturation of one event?

When you turn on the TV in the morning, the commentators from financial stations are in Beijing. The Today Show is in Beijing. Dish Network Corp. (Nasdaq: DISH) has launched an "interactive channel." When you open up your computer to your generic portal landing page, whatever it may be -- MSN.com, Yahoo.com, AOL.com -- the screen fills up with images and video snippets from the Olympics.

That's not to say it isn't working. People are watching, though I wonder how various media outlets fare as the Olympics coverage is sliced and diced over a mind-bending number of channels.

My 8-year-old daughter is developing a concerning obsession with Michael Phelps. I'm not the biggest swimming fan (to me it's uneasy watching swimmers with their unnaturally physical, shaved smooth bodies, futuristic clingy suits, and mirrored goggles. Are they human?). We have at time debated the channel change between, say, swimming and soccer (for her, swimming always wins). My mother confessed to me that she had stayed up all night watching the Olympics the first day.

Now, although I hear that the NBC Olympics site is drawing millions of viewers, I'm scared of the damn thing, and thoroughly convinced it's nothing more than a mass conspiracy to get the world to download Silverlight. When you go there you are bombarded with snippets of content from obscure events such as sculling and badminton. Can't really decide what to watch, or if I even have time. Cook dinner for the kids or watch Badminton? You be the judge of the more reasonable activity. Try clicking on the videos: if you haven't' downloaded Silverlight yet, then you must do so. Then watch some pre-roll ads. Then, the computer just may crash. After you reboot, you are rewarded with the joy of watching one-man sculling -- quite possibly the world's most boring spectator sport (the boredom in watching led me to wonder: might one of them crash, or just tip over?).

It turns out that YouTube Inc. has launched an Olympics channel. For god's sake, why? Like you haven't been bombarded with enough slick, HD-infused versions of the Olympics that you have to resort to combing through grainy pre-rolls that have been uploaded in amateur fashion?

Contrast this Web Olympics experience to viewing the Olympics on the crisp, clear, HD flat panel, powered by a user-friendly Verizon FiOS feed, fortified with a dual-channel tuner DVR. At any time there are at least three different channels feeding Olympic coverage -- NBC, Universal-HD, MSNBC -- surfing between them is as easy as punching a button. My daughter protests as I flip during a commercial from the beach volleyball to the Nigeria/Japan soccer contest. No worries, the DVR assures that we can store up to watch later -- as if there will ever be a later. The weekend has been so consumed with Olympics media saturation that I can't imagine that there will ever have time to take a break from watching the Olympics in order to watch the Olympics. It's not just 24X7, it's 24X7X3XDVR. Infinite. Multidimensional.

So over-consuming it is, that when you drill into it, it gets tiring. So I come to work and I'm relieved that I can just... work. But part of my work involves the Olympics on the Web, so I browse the offerings. More Silverlight. More pre-rolls. More waiting for videos to load. More computer crashes. Worst of all: The Web offerings seem to be haphazardly edited, without the slick production of TV. This morning I clicked on a piece about the U.S. vs. China basketball match, which I didn't have time to watch, and it featured exactly zero minutes of basketball. The entire video consisted of half-time commentary with zero highlights.

Conclusion from the first three days of the Olympics experience: The Web video experience has a long ways to go. It's still quite crude. Hands down, the TV wins. It's dumb, it's consumer friendly, it feeds to the big screen. And I don't have to worry about Silverlight crashing.