- Predictably engaging in the worst course of action
The IOC bans E-journos from Sydney. And that's just the start of its troubles (August 20)
NBCOlympics.com: Even worse than television (August 20; with UPDATE)- Olympic convergence: The ongoing boondoggle (August 26)
- IOC to athletes: Unplug or go home (September 2; UPDATE)
- Dick Pound: The Internet is a twee, bourgeois irrelevancy (September 10)
See also: Mighty Olympics vanquished – The Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games has, in effect, been found guilty of discrimination for producing an inaccessible Web site
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2000.08.20
The Olympics:
Predictably engaging in the worst course of action
Gee, we always knew the Olympics were all about exclusion, and we do not refer to the top percentile of world athletes. That part we can live with. The International Olympic Committee's entrenched corruption and plutocracy are well-known, thanks to the books of Andrew Jennings. We can even live with that, as must the athletes, to far worse effect.
What we resent is the IOC's cluelessness with online content. And here we are equating the NBC television network with the IOC. They aren't peas in a pod; they are Siamese peas, or, we suppose, conjoined peas.
IOC: No E-J
The IOC announced this week that no online-only journalists would be permitted at the Sydney Games. (Useful Weblog.) We also recall brave efforts to limit circulation of online information at Atlanta and Nagano, and laughable Web sites put together by a company that should know better, IBM. In 1996, we wrote an article dissing the official Atlanta Web "presence":
Let's face it: The Olympics are an event experienced by remote control for all but a fraction of the millions of people who follow the Games. The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) estimates that this summer's Olympics, running from July 19 to August 4, will generate some 3,000 hours of TV coverage and attract 3.5 billion viewers. You're about as likely to find a real person who has been to an Olympics as you are to find an athlete who has competed in one. There's a profound sense of displacement. You'd think that would make the World Wide Web, a medium in which all points are the same distance away from one another, a natural.
But it isn't altogether easy digging up concrete information on the Games from the ACOG site at www.atlanta.olympic.org. Consider event results: If you're a fan of one of those oddball sports the TV networks pretend to care about when the Olympics roll around – wrestling, maybe, or water polo – then you know how hard it is to find out who won which medals from traditional media, including TV. The Web is an obvious source of detailed masses of information that TV networks find too boring or uncommercial to report. At press time, all the ACOG site had to say about results was that "starting lists, time, schedules, location, changes, and live results of each and every one of the more than 560 sessions included in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games" would be available, and ACOG Webmaster Ronda Rattray promises that results will be easy to find.
A press release posted on the site asserts that a whopping total of 3.5 million tickets are available for purchase online at sales.atlanta.olympic.org, but a closer inspection reveals only ten or so events – including soccer, basketball, rowing, and volleyball – that even have tickets left to buy. Still, ACOG confirms that the huge number is accurate. However, the qualification criteria for online ticket-buying are onerous: You must "use an SSL-enabled Web browser [i.e., a browser that supports Secure Socket Layer security features], such as IBM Secure WebExplorer or Netscape Navigator [uncommon in 1996]; have a U.S. mailing address; and have a valid Visa credit-card account." Memo to ACOG: This is the World Wide Web, not the USA Wide Web.
You want merchandise? Of course you want merchandise. Everybody needs a mass-produced officially-licensed souvenir festooned with copyright and trademark warnings as a deeply personal memento of these magical Games. Pin trading, a quaint hobby practiced mostly by athletes in bygone days, is big business now, and ACOG's Web site offers a membership form to join the official Pin Society. Funny how the form is one you have to print out and write on manually, then snailmail in, rather than an online form you complete right from your Web browser. You can't even order a merchandise catalogue online; you need to call a toll-free number....
But let's not forget Izzy, the Games' mascot and the first Olympic mascot created from Day One as an animated character. Izzy looks like he just popped out of a mutant Jell-O mold and lacks the personality and graphic pizazz of, say, Mickey Mouse or Itchy and Scratchy from the Simpsons; even stodgy Sports Illustrated disses Izzy as a "maligned, spermesque mascot." Quoth the Web site: "He's more than the official children's character of the Centennial Olympic Games – he's a star in the world of entertainment and the focal point of product lines that include clothing, linens, novelty items and ever-popular Olympic pins." Gosh, how wacky. [We] thought the Olympics were supposed to be classy.
Our predictions were borne out and exceeded, with well-publicized snafus. (No, you couldn't easily order tickets online. Heck, IBM couldn't even get the sportswriter information computers working.)
An organization that covers up positive drug tests, forces the impoverished, neglected Paralympics to alter its symbol of five yin-yang teardrops to three because five look too much like the Olympic rings, and flies its addled, bilking, ancien régime tinpot-dictator committee members first class around the world while Olympic athletes eke out livings on welfare
and through food banks will of course do absolutely everything wrong online. Like telling E-journos to get lost.
Apparently some kind of summit is foreseen in Lausanne this December to discuss Internet rights. Since Dick Pound – a man we've tangled with personally – is sure to chair the meeting, expect no progress. Don't believe us? The press release for that summit itself warns:
Following the collective request from Olympic broadcast rights-holders, the IOC Executive Board confirmed that no moving images or audio coverage of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games on the Internet will be authorized. Similarly, the IOC Executive Board confirmed that for Sydney athletes will not be permitted to carry or allow third parties to place any electronic device on their person for the purpose of gathering biometrics data for Internet or other use.
(On the last point, the Australians may be upset. As with many other nations, telemetry plays an important role in their sport science. One thinks of rowing.)
The IOC: Greeting the future with its back turned.
Fixing things
We're not even Dick Pound and we can think of ways to cybercast the Olympics, in any medium, and still protect the precious rights of NBC and other de facto IOC funding agencies.
- Yes, national boundaries are a complicating issue, unless of course one simply awarded Internet licenses the way cellphone licenses are awarded: As oligopolies. Three large sites in each language, for example, competing against each other. One could easily imagine BBC, NBC, and Network Ten Olympic sites in English, for example. (We wish we could X NBC off the list, but let's be realistic.) The IOC is keen on exclusivity, not competition; we would respectfully submit that limited competition is the absolute best it can ever expect to impose.
- Further, results could be delayed a short time. NBC plans to do its standard jingoistic advertiser-fellating nonsense and tape-delay Sydney events by up to a full day (gotta highlight that American team in prime time, boys). We're not talking about that. We think instead of headline news services on TV, which show near-real-time sports quotes and stock-market scores 15 or so minutes late.
- Don't like exclusivity? Well, we're all liberated here. We can handle some swinging. Do what Sydney is already doing with "non-rightsholders": You get in on any given day of competition if you draw one of eight lots. Under Nielsenian logic, visitors can zip to competitors in the blink of an eye. Here we accept reality and let people read Olympic news on ABC Australia, ABC U.S., CBC, Reuters, or CNN sites on various days. (The same holds with sites working in other languages, though biggies, and not just the media moguls, might cheat and translate English-language copy.)
Meanwhile, NBC has mated with Quokka, the overhyped site that ostensibly produces sexy real-time sports "content" but really is a TV studio wannabe, for a contradiction in terms, an "official" Web site, NBCOlympics.com.
(Who will be first to register NBCOlympicsSucks.com? Let's start a legal defense fund for the inevitable IOC trademark lawsuit and domain arbitrations.)
What's wrong, exactly? Even critics who like the site say it's too high-bandwidth. Not content to own television rights in the U.S., NBC wants to bring the television experience to the Web. Here we go again.
First, you'd better have a high-speed connection. If you have an old-fashioned dial-up modem, be prepared with a cup of coffee and some reading material. You'll be doing some waiting as each page – containing six or more frames, lots of snazzy Java-based menus, graphics, etc. – loads, piece by piece. On my stodgy old Mac, it's like watching someone assemble a jigsaw puzzle.
Second, if you would like to send interesting articles and Web pages on to friends, or provide links to stuff from your own Web page, you can't [because there are no persistent hyperlinks].... I wanted to point our readers to the portion of the site that explains synchronized diving. There's no way to do this, directly, as far as I could determine in 30 minutes of trying.
What a lousy idea, as we've explained before.
Even the site's photo galleries are atrocious, exceeding anything we've ever seen, even from AOLers' Webcams. Remember, this is a multi-million-dollar site, and the photos it gives us are enormous magnifications of pixelated digital snapshots. Contemptible.
UPDATE (August 22): NBC seems to make a great many mistakes in sports sites. It's fighting a losing battle against ESPN and Sportsline; NBC recapitulates the conceit that, since it is a heavy hitter on television, it must become one online, too. That game is over, kids. And how does this sound as a memorable, easy-to-type domain name? MSNBCSports.com. Flows mellifluously off the fingertip. "Once sports fans find MSNBCSports.com, they may be in for a shock. Even in August, the NBA, not baseball, stands atop the navigation bar. Recently, the tennis pages featured a story dismissed by other sites: 'NBC posts high Wimbledon ratings,' " an article describes. Can you say "money pit"?
2000.08.26
An article notes that Quokka has assumed nearly every conceivable risk in its online venture with giant NBC, all in return for a small logo on each page and dubiously valuable bragging rights within the incestuous Internet industry, of which this site is of course part. The mouse sleeps with the elephant and pays him not to roll over. As if.
Further, the venerable Wall Street Journal, which really ought to know better, rubber-stamps the conventional wisdom of Olympic plutocrats and recapitulates the misrepresented relation between television and Internet rights.
"The IOC has a terrific business model now, moving images from the Olympics on a country-by-country basis. You can do that with television, but not with the Internet," says Kevin Monaghan, vice president of business development for NBC Sports, which holds U.S. broadcast rights through the 2008 Games. "They don't want to negatively impact their TV rights, nor do we." [...] Once NBC's video enters the public domain, newscasts and talk shows can replay it, which would undermine the uniqueness of NBC's coverage during U.S. prime time. By extension, if video of the 400-meter men's relay appeared on the Web before NBC's broadcast, the value of the network's tape would diminish considerably.
The WSJ seems to confuse "video" with "news." Online video isn't remotely near broadcast-quality. There isn't a television network anywhere that would telecast a QuickTime or RealVideo snippet. Hence we are discussing two incompatible species of moving imagery.
The news of the results of the 400 m relay will be released instantaneously after the event, and posted instantaneously thereafter at various Web sites worldwide. (You don't need rightsholder status to report who won a race.)
In fact, posting crappy Web video of the race would stoke interest in the high-quality television version, which, first of all, nearly everyone would wait for due to the time difference in the United States. (It must be emphasized that the CBC will televise Sydney Olympic events live, and many border residents will watch the decidedly less ethnocentric, jingoistic, and corporate Canadian feed. We are talking, as ever, about American broadcast perversions here.) Only a small coterie of early adopters would watch the cybercast – quite literally so, since it might happen at a very early 0530 or 0200 local time.
Instead, Quokka ain't showin' nothin'. IOC decrees to this effect are merely convenient rationalizations, a word that tends to come up in these discussions.
"We went into this venture with NBC knowing there would probably be some kind of limitations," [a Quokka/NBC apologist] said. "Frankly, the video experience isn't very good. We probably wouldn't have changed a lot if we hadn't had this as a variable. One of the problems with streaming video is bandwidth problems that most people have. If you're sitting on a 28.8 modem, it doesn't work very well. It breaks up. It's not very good."
Well, make lemonade, why don'tcha?
If, in some future parallel universe, online video quality begins to rival television's, then the IOC and rightsholders can worry. For now, we have a hard time understanding the rationalizations against cybercasting at least the highlights of the Olympics.
Moreover, we think streaming audio, in many channels (All Water Polo All the Time!™), would succeed brilliantly online. And why not steal a technique from soccer sites, which sometimes summarize in real time what takes place in soccer telecasts that office workers cannot actually watch? (We also see an application of access technologies here, but we'll write about that some other time.)
Old-fart television and sport executives know less than nothing about the net. They attempt to impose a television model. They're not alone: When it comes to "the media," all that Americans ever think about is television, and mass-market network television at that. All other media are held to that standard, even if it's an apples-'n'-oranges comparison. But we digress.
2000.09.02
We didn't think the IOC could top itself, but never say never.
- IBM clearly held rights to conduct transactions over the net (though doesn't that imply E-commerce?), but the IOC finally clued in that the net might be important and is trying to hog every conceivable right. As a result, IBM isn't renewing its contract with IOC. Or vice-versa. It is tempting to lay blame with the IOC here, and we can resist everything but temptation. Obviously the old fascist is hoping for an NBC-style windfall for still-nebulous Internet rights, which the IOC is making as hard to secure as possible at the same time.
- Appallingly, U.S. athletes are banned from recounting their experiences on their own Web sites. How's that for content management? It all makes sense: A careful study of NBC television coverage reveals that the IOC holds the copyright. Apparently all you get out of the Olympic experience is the Olympic experience, and not the ability to communicate it to anyone else. Unless, of course, an accredited journalist asks you questions; suddenly then it's OK. We know that corporations are legal persons, but why must the IOC treat legal persons like corporations?
- UPDATE: Oddly, the IOC itself sanctions journals from five athletes: The Horizon Project. Of course, we don't expect consistency from the Olympics.
2000.09.10
The IOC's contempt for and deep misunderstanding of "new" media was made crystal-clear by none other than VP Dick Pound on CNN on September 9:
[Interview subject:] NBC is going to do a very delayed broadcast of most of the events. And so sports fans who really want to kind of stay on top of things through other media, and the net is a perfect medium for doing that, simply will be unable to.
POUND: Piffle. I mean, that's nonsense when you think of it. There are far more people in the world that have access to television that the thought of getting onto a computer is totally foreign. I mean, it's the wealthy countries and the developed countries where the Internet is active and used. So to say that I don't have a television set, but I do have my IBM ThinkPad and I want to be able to watch the Olympics on my ThinkPad because I can't afford a television, silly.
What do we take from this telling remark?
- The IOC thinks it's ridiculous to watch the Olympics on a computer. Well, it is, for reasons unrelated to Dick Pound's petty dismissals.
- Evidently the only possible way to cover the Games online is through video. A rightsholder could not possibly use text and photographs, for example.
- Since impoverished countries have similarly impoverished Internet access, rich countries with good Internet access should be shut out. And, of course, so should the poor countries with whatever Internet access they actually have.
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