TV Sports: NBC Olympics Delay and Streaming Bring Complaints on Twitter

The past animosity rested on tape-delaying certain marquee sports into prime time. But now Twitter has turned into a fiery digital soapbox against NBC, as its users have merged their resentment over tape delay with problems viewing the live streams.

The outrage has been distilled, simply, into #nbcfail. It is difficult for now to determine if #nbcfail represents a tiny minority or is a sampling of a widespread problem.

NBC believes it is the former.

The ire of #nbcfail was stoked Sunday when Vivian Schiller, NBC’s recently hired chief digital officer, retweeted a message that said “the medal for most Olympic whining goes to everyone complaining about what happens every 4 yrs., tape delay.”

She approvingly added “+1” to the Twitter posting, which was written by Jonathan Wald, the executive producer of “Piers Morgan Tonight” on CNN.

Schiller, a former New York Times executive who resigned last year from NPR amid controversy, quickly became the corporate symbol of anger about tape-delaying sports and the opening ceremony. And she isn’t even in the sports division.

To a degree, she wasn’t wrong. Complaining about tape delay is an Olympic sport in its way.

But the fans aren’t wrong either in their dislike of tape delay, a vestige of 1960s Olympic television production pioneered by ABC’s Roone Arledge.

It has been an effective tool for all Olympic networks, which have rationalized its use with this mantra: we hold the marquee sports until prime time to harvest the highest rating and optimize our advertising so we can afford our ever-increasing rights fees.

But fans long upset with tape delay have reason to keep complaining. Major sports are always televised live. Why not the Olympics? And with the tools available to NBC — multiple networks and the Internet — an all-live Olympics is possible.

And in a digital age, aggrieved fans can take to social media to protest in a way that was never available until recently. And yet, even in a digital age, NBC’s Olympic economics are still based largely on prime time — and the returns so far from London are stellar: 40.7 million viewers for the opening ceremony and 28.7 million for the first night of competition Saturday. Are all those who hate tape delay not watching or are they reluctant parts of the audience, knowing there’s no other way to watch the Games?

Still, NBC cannot fully savor the success, at least not yet. By streaming all sports live to an audience more ravenous than ever for video content on computers, iPads and smartphones, NBC might have believed it had found a complaint cure-all. If no streams were held until the events aired on tape in prime time, how could anyone complain about delay? If fans absolutely had to see Michael Phelps swim live, they could see it. Up to 40 live streams are available at once. Such a fetching bonanza sounds ideal, doesn’t it?

But people want what they want when they want it — and they don’t want the video to freeze, skip, pixelate or buffer excessively. Some who wanted to watch Phelps race Ryan Lochte live (many hours before they raced, on delay, on NBC) were disappointed when the live streams seized up as if hexed by an NBC rival.

Twitter has lit up with similar complaints — some satisfied customers have tweeted, too — from fans who don’t want to hear that the trouble might be on their end: their broadband service’s bandwidth; the age of their computers and mobile devices; thunderstorms; the number of people in an apartment building also streaming; or interference in the ionosphere from Ryan Seacrest’s Freedom Tower-size pompadour.

NBC did nothing to caution fans that any of these problems might arise or that they might have an imperfect experience. Those helpful advisories should have been posted on nbcolympics.com next to where users sign in to access video. Perhaps nobody should have anticipated perfection; this is a huge undertaking that probably could not have been tested by millions of users to mimic the actual experience once the Games began.