In today’s 24-hour news network world, do Olympics viewers care if they’re watching live events? No, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.* NBC packaged broadcasts so that it seemed as though matches and races were unfolding live before the viewing audience. Although this technique bombed in Sydney four years ago, TV viewership was up 13 percent for the Athens Olympics. However, consider these numbers with a grain of salt. The Globe and Mail* notes that NBC’s audience share is up nine percent, while CBC’s share rose 10 percent over Sydney — CBC provided live, multi-event broadcasts. Whatever the case, people seem to be adjusting to a world dominated by CNN news crawls. It looks like we can handle seeing the headlines a million times, as long as we can see the clips for ourselves. However, given broadcast bans on web clips, it’s still possible that viewers would rather access video on their own terms.

(c) 2004 by Andrea Coutu. Vancouver Marketing Consultant. All rights reserved.

*Links expired, but originally went to http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/08/28/sports1321EDT0443.DTL and http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040830/OLYTRUTH30/TPSports/Other