Olympic TV
Published by Jonathan February 24th, 2006 in Sports, TechnologyI have been quite frustrated with NBC regarding their coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics. However, this comes as no suprise since they did a similarly awful job back in 2002… so awful I was inspired to write a rant four years ago. Well, I won’t subject you to another rant so I’ll just let Jakob Nielsen, THE web usability guru, make his point. He’s much kinder than I would be.
Readers outside the U.S. can count themselves lucky not to be subjected to NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics. But even NBC is tolerable when watched on a digital video recorder: I set it to start recording every evening at 8 and then I start watching at 9: this gives me an extra hour to analyze eyetracking data and I can use the DVR to skip over commercials
and boring events. It’s easily possible to watch 3 hours of NBC broadcast in 2 hours of viewing.The entire concept of watching a broadcast at the mercy of the producers’ desire to stretch out the good parts across as much time as possible is getting to be obsolete. The experience from using the Web makes people impatient and forms a desire to control your own experience: to get what you want, when you want it. Non-clickable TV provides a sub-standard user experience for events like the Olympics with multiple components, where different people are interested in different things.
[edit: 2/26] Dave Zurin has a fantastic write up at The Nation, The Olympics We Missed.
After reading your blog & Dave Zurin’s article, I couldn’t agree with you more. I didn’t pay much attention to the games on TV this year nor did many other people I know. Mostly because of the coverage. The events I was interested in, just weren’t on so I’d get the updates via other means.
I think it’s time for a change.