Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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That's so over, as NBC just discovered the hard way. Millennials aren't watching the Olympics in large numbers.[1] In the 18-to-49-year-old age group, the audience has been 25% smaller than the London Olympics four years ago.

NBC CEO Steve Burke described his "nightmare" before the Olympics: "We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent. 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." That almost happened. Ratings were down 17%. NBC/Comcast has prepaid for the Olympics through 2032. That looks like a bad deal now.

This is happening for other major sports. The average age over the past decade of National Football League and Major League Baseball viewers has increased by four and seven years, respectively, to 47 and 53. Baseball is a dying industry.

Of the top 100 high schools in the US, 67% do NOT have a football team.[2] In 1998, the top 10 had only one school without a football team. This year’s top 10 has seven.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-19/nbc-s-12-b... [2] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/americas-most-ch...

One of the problems with the Olympics is it is dominated by the sports that nobody cares about the other 47 months of the four years. Track and field, swimming, gymnastics, rowing, etc, etc, are not money sports; they aren't something that people dial into, even for their world championships.

And for the money sports, the Olympics have become a side-show. It is, economically speaking, idiotic for a professional athlete to put their career, and millions and millions of dollars in earnings, at risk for nationalism. So in many cases, the best in the world don't bother to show up.

Also, the NBC coverage is just awful. No wonder nobody wants to watch when it is wall-to-wall puff pieces, talking heads, and a few chopped and spliced highlights of the actual events.

Well, it sure doesn't help that the website is horrific when a huge part of your younger demographic only uses the internet instead of TV. I wanted to see highlights of the judo stuff. The landing page for "olympic judo" better have links to video RIGHT AWAY. Instead, you have to hit the landing, hit the headline, hit the video, wait for some silly player to zoom it's way in, wait through an ad, and ...

Never mind, YouTube or Facebook will have it. And, I'm on a desktop computer with a fast connection. I presume that the experience on mobile without an ad blocker borders on glacial.

Holy spaghetti monster, Batman. Make your website STICKY. Feed me more until I'm ready to explode. You have the most amazing athletes in the world on video, MAKE USE OF IT. Top 10 judo takedowns. Best soccer highlights. Worst wipeouts. And THEN give me the ability to drill into longer and longer videos.

It's not that hard to make me want to click things on your website when I already came there. But, this is what happens when it's about the ad revenue instead of sports coverage.

NBC has only themselves to blame.

As for the sports themselves, the other perennial problem is subjective vs objective judging. One thing that MMA has over boxing, for example, is an objective measure of victory. A lot of the olympic sports that have "busyness and spectacle" also have judging and we see in boxing what happened. Gymnastics has similar issues.

Although I agree with you mostly, MMA has had some WTF results here and there, nowhere near as bad as boxing overall though.

That's, like, your opinion, man. I care about the Olympics and all of the obscure sports, because I want to see humans doing amazing things with their bodies and pushing the limits of what is possible. I also buy into the narrative of it being an excuse for nations to come together. I also like that many of the events focus on individual success. The Olympics have the only sporting events I ever watch apart from tennis championships.

I do agree that the NBC coverage is awful. Their commentary could be much more subdued and intelligent. Fortunately it is possible to mute the inane audio.

Frankly, pushing limits in uninteresting if you don't understand what they are actually pushing and towards what - I think very few people can understand the intricasies of majority of the events.

It's really a poor excuse for nations to come together if no-one cares. Football is popular all the time, nearly everywhere - it's much more organic as a global come-together-watch-together event.

I can't personally understand the interest in sports beyond the personal experience - i.e. if one has familiarity in any skill or discipline it's incredibly enticing to observe true masters performance - but I do value in the philosophical sense the fact that all cultures come at the same playing field and speak the same language and share the same context in the form of the sport.

The problem is that if you don't do TV, there is no good way to track the Olympics. I admit I'm guilty. Since I don't have a TV anymore, I can't just throw it on in the background.

In addition, while it's great watching the best get their medals, the thrill is in the upset. Upsets are getting much rarer nowadays.

That's completely inaccurate. You can stream the olympics from nbcsports.com and from their app. I can count on one hand the number of people I know that both don't have internet, don't have a smartphone, and don't have TV.

It's not inaccurate; you can't stream the Olympics from NBC online without having a cable subscription. Of my friend cohort (late 20s), we are all interested in the Olympics, but none of us have cable, so we can't watch it except at bars or the occasional after-work group. I'd love to follow the events, but I can't open a stream as easily as I can a YouTube stream—what's with that?! NBC has been given access to the public airwaves in the US and that should come with a responsibility to show content openly, but they're not. I looked to buy a USB TV turner, but there don't appear to be any that receive US broadcasts that work on OSX (at least for under $100, which was my arbitrarily-chosen budget for watching the Olympics).

> You can stream the olympics from nbcsports.com

If you have cable TV, which I don't.

I tried a Sling.tv free trial. Ok, so it starts at $20/mo. But that didn't include NBC Sports. Ok, so upgrade. Ads. A lot of ads. And a little bit of Olympics. Wow, this is...awful, and I completely remember why I stopped paying for cable TV.

But the difference is PASSIVE vs ACTIVE.

No one is going to throw their smartphone on in the background. And NBC sure doesn't make it easy for me throw their website on in the background in high-def and just let it play. So that, when something happens, I can scrub it back a minute or two and watch actively.

NBC is guilty of not understanding that, with the internet, people don't need to tolerate being bored.

Oh? Show me a link where I can go that has legal streaming video from the olympics for all events (live or not) without requiring a cable subscription.

Who the hell has cable these days? Sheesh, what a waste of money.

"the Olympics have come, and they didn't know it." It's even worse than that. They know it. They just don't care.

Viewing is down on linear TV, which makes sense. Online viewing, on the other hand, has been significant.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-c...

On the other hand, the CBC[1] has no trouble attracting Olympic viewership. From other discussions I have read, it seems America's youth who are interested in these sports are oft being turned away because of poor production done by NBC, with some even claiming to be tuning into CBC's coverage stateside.

[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/olympics/gold-medal-wo...

Anecdotally, that is essentially it. I don't watch the NBC coverage of the Olympics because it's so terrible. I want to see the sports (preferably live) and I want to spend a minimum amount of time hearing about the life stories of select athletes (I can get a lot of that by going online and looking them up). To sum it up, I'd be more interested in watching the Olympics if they actually showed more of the Olympic events. I guess now they stream a lot more of the events online now. But after many years of bad NBC coverage I tend to just ignore that the Olympics are happening, so I don't remember that the options to watch (may have) improved.

Maybe. I was a little surprised at the amount of people I know who are watching the Olympics via less than legal means simply because NBC's coverage and commentary were terrible .

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