Once again, big entertainment announces they’ll be doing something awesome, then panics and overcompensates with their online security causing frustration and annoyance among viewers, limiting their potential moneymaking abilities. This time around, NBC online gets the booby prize. After making big announcements and running advertisements about allowing people to watch the entire Olympics online, NBC throttled the viewing experience with a horrible and limiting Microsoft DRM interface, killed any embedding abilities for the video, time-shifted everything and basically made even searching for the events you wanted to watch such a chore that they “only” managed to pull in $5.75 million during the two-week extravaganza.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics have had millions of Americans glued to the screen, whether on TV or online, with record viewership and Web site traffic. However, the great popularity of the games did not quite translate to huge amounts of video advertising. Based on video stream figures released by NBC, eMarketer estimates video ad spending on the NBCOlympics.com site will reach $5.75 million. That sum is surely a passable performance for a bit more than two weeks, but it represents only 1.1% of this year’s online video ad spending projection of $505 million in the US.
Even with the Olympics’ popularity, much of the record traffic on NBCOlympics.com was not video viewers. One reason for that discrepancy? NBCOlympics.com users were forced to download Microsoft Silverlight, the company’s competitor to Adobe Flash, and being asked to download something to access content tends to eliminate part of the audience.
It was also very creepy to watch the events sans announcers. Just felt weird.
Also, I tried to watch Phelps’ fingernail win and you’d think it’d be up on the site almost instantaneously….nope!