
NBC’s $12B Olympics Bet Stumbles, Thanks to Millennials - JumpCrisscross
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-19/nbc-s-12-billion-olympics-bet-stumbles-thanks-to-millennials?cmpid=BBD081916_BIZ
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davidgerard
> Back in June, Steve Burke described what he called his Olympics “nightmare.”
> “We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent,” the chief
> executive officer of NBCUniversal said at a conference. “If that happens, my
> prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a
> Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it.”

I'm 49 (Gen X), but ... this was basically me. I _literally had no idea_ the
Olympics had actually started until occasional posts about it showed up on
Tumblr. Nor did I realise it was in Rio until then.

The media hegemony broke as absolutely soon as we could escape them.

~~~
wahern
I surmised it was happening based on various news reports, but I just assumed
that it was impossible to view online unless you had cable.

I know Hulu and other outlets stream NBC content, but for stuff like this I
assume they put it behind one of those "login to your cable account" portals.

I get NBC over-the-air, but work and family mean parking myself in front of
the TV at specific times just isn't possible. Other than local news and a show
here or there, we watch television using our Roku.

I'm not a huge fan of the Olympics, but it's definitely something I'd watch if
it were easy, and even tolerate commercials for. NBC and other producers
aren't embracing streaming fast enough. They're losing whole generations of
viewers, and recapturing them will be more costly than taking a hit now and
making on-demand streaming a first-class content delivery channel.

It's like herding cats--they managed to get Americans to spend 4+ hours per
day sitting in front of the television. If you start to let them wander off in
random directions, it won't be easy to get those eyeballs back. There's no
reason I shouldn't be able to go straight to NBC.com right now and view every
new and archived episode of every show they've ever produced. Why NBC allows
Hulu and NetFlix to operate as middle-men, I'll never know. Hulu, et al should
be technology providers similar to Roku; instead they sit directly between NBC
and their revenue stream. Whatever NBC charges, they're almost certainly
losing more money than if the ecosystem was more open and centralized portals
less important. And why aren't local affiliates storming the castle? They're
getting screwed six ways from Sunday.

Maybe NBC is a bad example because they're owned by Comcast, which heavily
distorts their incentives and biases them to the status quo. But that's not
the case for other media companies.

~~~
davidgerard
Yep. But mostly, I'm just delighted I _literally never have to think about
this mass media BS any more_. I'm off trawling the bottom of Bandcamp and
writing about it on Rocknerd. It's the dream.

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
Those poor kids get blamed for everything.

