This morning, I saw an article from Bloomberg that placed blame on Millennials for not watching the Olympics. It was almost too early in the morning to deal with something that (yet again 🙄) is blaming some larger problem on a large & diverse group of young adults.

It should have been “Jennifer Lawrence Okay Gif”. Told you it was early in the morning.But I started to consider the words here from Steve Burke, NBCUniversal’s CEO:

“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.”First off, companies can buy advertising on those platforms to reach those audiences and put streams on Facebook and Twitter if you’re worried about people not being aware of your large event. (Well, maybe not Twitter.)

But in a way, he’s right for the wrong reasons. Lots of people spend a lot of time in the social media bubble. According to the NY Times, 50 minutes a day is spent on Facebook by the average user in one such example. Surely a lot of time is also spent on Twitter, Snapchat, and many other platforms. Most of these people aren’t ignorant of the Olympics. I’d say these platforms encourage knowing more about the Olympics through gifs, videos, and celebratory posts about various teams and individuals.

Here’s the problem: Between the hot takes, the rush to be first with that ‘original’ joke about how #LochteGate should have been called #LochMess, or trying to find the right gif to show sadness at the US Women losing to Sweden… Social Media is the “Right Now”. Meanwhile, NBC’s strategy has been “Please wait until Primetime. Please!” It’s not working anymore. It may have been slightly a problem in 2012 when they would show replays of Swimming, and I was at the only person at the nightly Olympic watch party that knew the result. Now it’s a huge problem because everyone knows!

I (unscientifically) polled my followers on Twitter a few questions:

https://twitter.com/DannyPage/status/766646933679202305I wanted to gauge how many people are finding out the results before they were shown at night. Olympic Gymnastics were a huge draw for American viewers, given the dominant team. Over half of people who participated in the poll knew the result before they were watching, while a mere **7% **of the poll were able to watch spoiler-free.

Some may have watched live, some saw gifs and videos online, and other people got push notifications on their phone when the event was over. Even the NBC Sports app will spoil the event for you if you would like! And that can be an okay thing, as they want you to be aware of the Olympics. But… It doesn’t turn into Primetime viewing and then advertisers get less bang for their buck.

https://twitter.com/DannyPage/status/766666734883438592The reason “Live Sports” as a category of TV has continued to do well is because there is always drama. Even in 1 PM football games with two weak teams, some people may watch out of team loyalty or for fantasy football. But ultimately, people watch sports because they don’t know the outcome ahead of time!

By not emphasizing live viewing of their sports on all their platforms, NBC has risked that people will drop their interest from 8PM — 12AM EDT. Some still may watch, but the excitement has to do with the mechanics of the event, rather than the result. Some may watch the gymnastics portion for the amazement, but you might not sit through the entire volleyball match. In fact, very few sports matches will ever be replayed. There’s no long-tail for sports. Very few DVD sets, except for the free ones that come with a new Sports Illustrated subscription.

This was not a problem in the past. The ‘Miracle On Ice’ game was on tape delay, but many thought it was broadcast live. But that could not happen today. You wouldn’t hold a large event and hope people still tune in for the drama of the unknown result 3 hours later. Perhaps that’s why NBC has leaned even more on the biographies and life stories; because otherwise, the result is just a Google search away and the perfect moment from that event is being retweeted 10,000 times in the form of a six-second Vine.

NBC has it bad now, but they are going to have an even worse time in 2018 (Pyeongchang, South Korea), 2020 (Tokyo, Japan) and 2022 (Beijing, China). They are respectively ahead by 13, 13, and 12 hours. That means most of the important results will happen overnight for American viewers. Viewers in NYC may have to wake up at 5 in the morning to catch the 100 meter sprint finals! If they embrace internet streaming in a larger way, they may do okay. But as information becomes more widely available and at the forefront of our digital lives, TV networks will have to realize that they need to let go of their idea of Primetime being the golden hours in television. They must create better streaming solutions that are user friendly. Or at the very least, a playlist of events I can watch on my phone when I wake up before reading someone blaming Millennials. Again.

P.S. I didn’t mention NBC’s poor production values. Commentators in Gymnastics not meeting the bare minimum of explaining to the audience why deductions were being taken. There was no rhyme or reason given to the audience to guide them to further understanding. Another issue was way too many commercials. Heck, I think Ashton Eaton starred in more commercials than his time being shown in the primetime coverage. Turns out he won back to back Gold in the Men’s Decathlon. But Ryan Lochte gets more coverage in providing his own spin. 🤔

Apparently BBC had really good coverage: I’ll be curious to see their viewing numbers. It could be down because of timezone concerns, but by all accounts it was good viewing. Meanwhile, NBC definitely dropped the ball despite their timezone advantage, one that will really trouble them in the next 6 years. **Update: **The Canadian Broadcast Corporation released their numbers, and they had their best watched Summer Olympics. Same timezone as NBC, so they must be doing something correctly. Thanks, Brad!

Please recommend and share if you liked this article, and let me know if I missed anything in the comments!