The combination of some must-see competition — U.S. vs. Canada in ice hockey — led NBC’s Olympic online efforts to a couple days of record-setting numbers in terms of overall viewers. Friday’s men’s semifinal game will go down as one of those watershed moments in online sports viewing, with NBC reporting more than 2.1 million unique users of the network’s “Live Extra” online video. Friday’s totals followed Thursday’s 1.2 million online viewers of the women’s gold medal game between the same two countries.
While several factors probably contributed to the perfect storm of viewership on Friday morning — an important game, during the least important day in the U.S. work week — what makes the more-than-a-Super-Bowl total even more impressive is the fact that if you were watching the game, you almost certainly had a cable TV contract to allow access. While we give credit to NBC for its achievement, we can only wonder how big the online number could have been if NBC had opened up its Olympic online coverage to all viewers, not just those with cable validation.
In the wake of this week’s blockbuster $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook, it’s worthwhile to ask whether or not broadcasters are being too old school when it comes to monetization models for big events like the Olympics. I don’t know the answer to this, but how much money could NBC potentially reap if it tried a WhatsApp pricing model — say, $1 for all Olympic streaming coverage — instead of restricting it to current cable customers? Here’s another idea: How about a streaming channel that shows the prime time coverage, without commercials, without blabbering hosts, available at hours children can watch? Anyone else out there like me who would gladly pay an extra $5 for something like that? Of course, then NBC’s prime time numbers would fall even further than they have already.
So yes, cheer for the massive online numbers. But the fact that just about every big event keeps setting new mobile/online viewer “records” should be a message that there is possibly a bigger untapped audience out there, maybe even far larger than the conventional TV/cable audience. Remember, at the last Olympics WhatsApp barely existed. The current model of sports-content distribution reminds me more of the cellular carriers’ approach to text messaging (remember 10 cents a message?) than WhatsApp’s version. And it’s pretty clear who’s winning that battle. It’s not the team who never saw the competition coming because they played by different rules.
