So the Olympics ended last night. Closing ceremony, all the fireworks and the weird fashion moment and Spice Girls popping out of black cabs, One Direction doing whatever that was. I watched almost the whole thing, and I want to talk about how I watched it, because that's the part that actually stuck with me.
To get the live stream on NBCOlympics.com you had to log in with your cable provider. Not create an NBC account, not pay NBC anything directly — you had to prove you already had a pay-TV subscription somewhere, hand over those credentials, and only then would it let you watch. I sat there at like 7:40pm trying to remember whether our cable login was my roommate's email or the account number off a bill from four months ago, digging through my email for a password reset link while the ceremony was already starting. Got in eventually. But its such a strange piece of design when you think about it: the actual TV broadcast is free, sitting right there over the air or on basic cable, and the online version, the one aimed at people who are already at a laptop instead of a couch, is the one they decided to gate.
And this wasnt even a new complaint by the time last night rolled around. Back at the end of July there was that whole thing where a Guardian reporter, Guy Adams, tweeted the corporate email address of an NBC exec because he was annoyed about the tape delay, and Twitter suspended his account over it, and then un-suspended it a day later once it turned out Twitter and NBC had some kind of promotional partnership for the Olympics. That story got picked apart everywhere for being a pretty bad look, a social network doing a favor for a business partner instead of treating a user complaint like a user complaint. I dont think anyone at Twitter's comms team is happy that ever became public.
Anyway the actual complaint under all of that, the tape delay thing, thats real and I get it. Primetime coverage here is edited and delayed and packaged into a story NBC wants to tell, hours after the outcome already happened and was sitting on every feed and every front page. I gave up trying to avoid results days ago. Its just not worth the anxiety of staying off Twitter for six hours.
Which is what made last week such a contrast for me. Curiosity landed on Mars on the 6th, and I watched that whole thing on NASA JPL's stream, free, no login, no provider check, just a browser window with mission control audio and a countdown. It got so much traffic their stream buckled for a bit right around the landing, which is sort of a nice problem to have honestly, that many people wanting to watch a robot parachute onto another planet at the same moment. No tape delay either — that landing happened live, at 1:31am Eastern, and if you were awake for it you saw it the second everyone in the room saw it. I was up because I'd set an alarm like an idiot, sat in the dark with my laptop on my chest, and it was genuinely one of the better things Ive watched online this year. A government space agency outperformed a broadcast network on basic usability, is sort of where I landed on that.
I dont think NBC is wrong to want the ceremony to draw huge ratings, or to want people watching ads instead of skipping straight to results. Thats the business. But it says something that the thing I'll actually remember more fondly from these two weeks is a livestream from a space agency with a NASA budget, not the multi-billion-dollar broadcast rights production. One of those made we want to go find the login page again next time. The other one I just watched, straight through, no password reset required.
Anyway. Ceremony's over, London's Olympics are done, and Im going back to my normal browser tabs now instead of three different ones for streams and Twitter and a scores page I promised myself Id stop refreshing.