• NBC is catching a lot of flack for its revenue-preserving strategy of not showing any live/interesting Olympics coverage, preferring to bunch it all in to primetime in an effort to chase the ad dollar.
• This has annoyed lots of people, and will continue to annoy ever increasing numbers of people. The people it’s already annoying, though, are on-demand, my-schedule-not-your-schedule consumers of content, and will be most vocal in their annoyance.
• Unfortunately these people also happen to demonstrably be people who actually want to watch the Olympics.
• We’re in a period of flux, because NBC only has so many hours of broadcast spectrum to fill, but broadcast spectrum is still the easiest way of reaching lots of people. This is not good for anyone, and uncomfortable for everyone.

This was brought home to me by the Bafta coverage in the UK on Sunday:

• The Bafta Film Awards are Bafta’s event. They run them when, and where, they want to.
• But like Wimbledon, there may always be some sort of consideration as to when things happen, especially if there are lucrative (my supposition) broadcast rights involved
• The BBC, like NBC, only has so many hours of broadcast spectrum, though
• You have a public who want to know what the results are, a la the Olympics, and you have a few ways of getting hold of those results:
  • Live, undelayed broadcast
  • As-live, delayed broadcast
  • Live online (video, text, tweet, whatever)
• Best result would be live online updates, plus live, undelayed broadcast. Everyone finds out everything at the same time, and you get the moving picture drama (important, I reckon, for this particular event) of the awards ceremony that you don’t get with text
• Second best? Probably what we had on the night. Online, live - in this case, text - and broadcast for everyone else. I’m happy to include myself in an edge case/minority in that I followed both Bafta’s tweets, as well as wanting to watch the broadcast. I want to know who won, but it was scrumptious to see Cameron’s reaction to Bigelow’s directorial win
• Now, I don’t know if live, undelayed broadcast was an option. It’s the BBC’s schedule, and there are only so many avenues for terrestrial broadcast. Bafta’s options are, for the time being, limited.

This’ll all shake itself out, more or less, in the next few years.