Note to NBC: you don't own the Olympics

[mdlbear]

Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz | InfoWorld | NBC doesn't own the Olympics, we do | August 9, 2008 06:46 AM | Ephraim Schwartz

To NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and other commercial broadcasters around the world I say, figure out another way to make money. The airwaves, the Internet airwaves at least, belong to us.

It wasn't the opening ceremonies at the Olympics that was thrilling but rather reading the accounts of the grass roots collaborative efforts of people around the world doing an end run around the commercial sites who claimed to own the rights to broadcast the event by sharing, often over YouTube, videos of the Games.

People were not content to watch a sanitized, tape delayed version of a major global event and when YouTube owners Google played the subservient pawn in NBC's commercial endeavors we witnessed new videos pop up just as fast as they could shut down the old. And when that didn’t work users were sharing links across Twitter and other collaborative sites.

The New York Times quoted Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics, as saying "we have a billion dollars worth of revenue at stake here, so that means we're not public television, for better or worse."

Well it is going to be worse.

Comments

[kayshapero]

Hear hear! Frippin' idiots....

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

It's not 'just' a billion dollars of revenue for NBC.

It's trillions of dollars of revenue for China.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

we have a billion dollars worth of revenue at stake

Yes, but the point is that it's a billion dollars of potential revenue from a non-ownable source which has never been theirs in the first place - they were simply the ones who had previously been able to exploit it most profitably. (And most publically, and, to a large extent, at all.)

All of a sudden, there are a million and one other people nibbling at those same free resource, and the commercial broadcasters are running around howling "Mine! Mine!" while being utterly ignored.

It's the same cries that the MPAA and RIAA are making. Previous sources of revenue-through-scarcity are being challenged because the service provided is now becoming less scarce. The barriers to entry are falling, and there's only so much legal propping-up that can be done before the entire edifice collapses. The sane thing to do is to leverage the brand, the infrastructure, the influence, and the immense profits from yesteryear, and find a new frontier to be robber barons on. Diversify, don't cling to old frameworks which are dissolving.

[mdlbear]

Exactly.