February 21st, 2006

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Sports, Television
9 Comments »

All Luge, All the Time

The 10,000 channel universe can’t come soon enough for the Olympics. Networks such as CBC or NBC have a fundamental program: one information-delivery channel, and many simultaneous events to deliver. So they constantly compromise. Here’s a typical CBC broadcast schedule:

Speed Skating – Women’s 1500m – Final, Alpine Skiing – Women’s Slalom – Final, Freestyle Skiing – Women’s Aerials – Final, Short Track Speed Skating – Women’s 1000m preliminary and 3000m relay Final; Men’s 500m preliminary

Practically, that means two speed skating races, three ski jumps, some hockey highlights, a bit of curling, all interspersed with repetitive (and totally untargeted) ads. Plus, of course, the frequency of advertising varies. Oddly (and wonderfully) there are no ads during hockey games. Conversely, you can’t get through more than one figure skating routine without ads.

How many more Olympics will we go through before we have, I don’t know, 40 Olympic channels, one for each event? I’m not requiring tons of fluff content like profiles and equipment explanations (though there could be one channel that just showed those for all the sports). I just want to be able to watch every single luge run-from the preliminary runs by Jamaica 2 to the finals. I feel certain that all of this material is been documented–it’s just not being shown.

(Truth be told, I couldn’t care less about luge. I’m just using it as an example).

Comments: 9 Responses so far

Joe
February 21st, 2006
5:49 pm

First of all your right, somebody is shooting all this footage, and secondly there is a an audience for all of it. However the audience is most definitely *not* global.

So store it all, so the hockey, ski, skate and luge geeks get to see the lot over low/slow bandwidth links and do the live broadcast stuff on a pay per view basis. The BBC will make a call to pay for curling for all of the UK and if you want different you pay extra. Similarily for canada and hockey/skiing. With the right audience the subscription rate should be low (i.e. near zero).

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Chris Garrett
February 22nd, 2006
3:33 am

It is only a matter of time before the BBC streams everything or makes it available for download like they do their radio broadcasts, already using interactive TV we can see more footage than the broadcast on both tax-tv (BBC) and the commercial channels.

10,000 channels? I see it as millions of tv programs, all available to download or stream as soon as they are published rather than waiting on some channels scheduling

(I hope this doesn’t appear twice, cocomment barfed)

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JohnB
February 22nd, 2006
6:00 am

Though not as true during the winter Olympics, the CBC French channel (hosted by the luminescent Marie-José Turcotte) has tended to show a much broader selection of sports. In Sydney, lots of equestrian events, for example, were broadcast and these simply weren’t even shown — even in 10 second recaps — on other channels.

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Sue
February 22nd, 2006
9:15 am

When the coverage first started I was watching the Olympics probably more than is really healthy. In the past week, however, every time I turn on CBC there seems to be yet another hockey game. I’m sick of Olympic hockey! I’m much more interested in the individual sports. I wish they’d stick all the hockey and curling on TSN, just play highlights of important games on CBC, and focus on showing what the Olympics is supposed to be about: higher, faster, stronger.

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Dean
February 22nd, 2006
9:56 am

You’re exactly right, the pervasive, Fellini version of the Olympics; every tragi-comic, inspirational, mundane, and breathe-halting moment – captured in long form. The long tail of the Olympics (is long tail the beginning of the re-interpretation of ‘real-time’?).

However, then we would lose the meta-discussions about the Olympic ‘coverage’ (which is all anyone really seems to be talking about – the media’s coverage of the Olympics, rather than the thing itself).

And if we’re all watching our own private channels, we won’t have anything left to talk to each other about…

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Chris
February 23rd, 2006
4:30 am

BBC are farily good, they atelast give you the choice of normally 2 or 3 events to watch.

They have interactive sport down better than most channels probably. When Wimbledons on we get a choice of which court (choice of 3 or 4 on freeview, and I think all courts on Sky)

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Declan
February 23rd, 2006
12:14 pm

Yes, I couldn’t agree more – in fact I’ve been telling people this for years. If they can do it for the NFL (Sunday Ticket) I see no reason why they can’t do it for the Olympics (especially since the two never overlap).

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Declan
February 23rd, 2006
12:17 pm

I should add that CBC has already started down this road, offloading popular but time consuming events (Curling, Hockey) to TSN and offloading unpopular time-consuming events (Cross-Country, Biathlon) to Country Canada. They just need to go all the way and market it properly.

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Monica
March 16th, 2006
1:00 pm

Hey, Is there a way to get a copy of all the luge runs in the Olympics this year? or in any event this year? Does anyone know. Email me back if you have any idea. I am willing to pay. Oh and yes I thought I would add I am a “luge junkie”. Thanks.

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