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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.6 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                OLYMPICS, Page 64

1992 SUMMER GAMES

TELEVISION: How Much Is Too Much?


NBC's TripleCast offered more coverage than ever, but viewers
weren't buying

By RICHARD ZOGLIN -- With reporting by William Tynan


    TV's full-throttle coverage of the Olympics has, as
usual, been a matter less of journalism than of mythmaking.
Every event, in the gauzy gaze of NBC's commentators, is a test
of national character or moral courage. Every athlete has a
stirring personal story or a dramatic comeback tale or at the
very least a recent death in the family. NBC's latest
contribution to the patriotic gush is a series of celebratory
music videos -- among them, Marc Cohn warbling about swimming
champ Pablo Morales, and D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince
getting all rapped up in the Dream Team.

    But the TV issue posed by the '92 Games is not the
coverage's quality. (The judging from here: a respectable bronze
medal for Bob Costas' cool authority in the anchor booth and
those welcome stretches of silence from the gymnastics
commentators during crucial routines.) The issue is quantity.
NBC scheduled a typically excessive 161 hours of coverage over
the Olympics fortnight. In addition, the network put together
an elaborate pay-per-view package: three additional channels of
events, running 24 hours a day (12 of them live). Cost: a hefty
$125 for the 15-day package, or $29.95 for one day.

    By the start of the Olympics, the TripleCast, as NBC
dubbed it, was as famous as any of the U.S. athletes. Network
promos for the pay-TV package began running months before the
Games began. Early reports of slow sales inspired a torrent of
press stories that a financial disaster was looming for NBC and
its partner in the venture, Cablevision. David Letterman
started making jokes.

    NBC executives stoutly predicted that a rush of
last-minute buyers would make the venture a success. But the
figures that began leaking out last week could hardly have been
worse. Pay-Per-View Update, an industry newsletter, estimated
that only 125,000 homes signed up for the two-week package.
TripleCast officials said the figure was between 200,000 and
250,000. Either way, it represents a paltry fraction of the 2
million that had been projected. By midweek discounts were being
offered: a reduced $19.95 a day and a special weekend rate of
$29.95. But even if late sales pick up, the TripleCast will not
come close to generating enough income to meet its costs --
about $100 million for production and promotion, plus whatever
portion is allocated of the $401 million NBC paid for the TV
rights.

    Ironically, the financial picture was brighter for NBC's
old-fashioned broadcast coverage. For the first five nights of
competition, the Games averaged a surprisingly high 19.9
prime-time rating -- 17% higher than the Seoul Games got for the
same period four years ago. NBC, expecting a falloff, had
promised advertisers only between a 15 and 16. Still, NBC
officials conceded that the network would probably lose $30
million to $40 million on its Olympics investment.

    The ambitious TripleCast always posed a tricky problem for
NBC. To promote it, the network implicitly had to denigrate its
own broadcast coverage -- stressing that the pay-TV event would
be live and commercial free in contrast to the broadcast
programming, which is mostly taped and filled to the brim with
ads. Indeed, TripleCast viewers -- however few -- have found
NBC's evening coverage disingenuous, not to say superfluous:
Costas and crew have had to manufacture suspense around events
already completed and aired earlier in the day. What's more, the
TripleCast's no-nonsense approach (events shown in full; no
distracting feature stories) has made the network's prime-time
coverage seem even more schmaltzy and overproduced.

    Industry analysts had several explanations for the
TripleCast flop. NBC and its cable partner had projected that
5% of the potential pay-per-view audience would sign up -- an
unrealistically high buy rate achieved only by major boxing and
wrestling events that cost much less and can be seen nowhere
else. The $125 price tag was apparently too rich for viewers,
especially since the live coverage airs mostly during working
hours and is repeated on free TV in the evenings. Nor did NBC
make an effort to lure viewers with more limited, less expensive
packages geared for fans of specific sports, such as boxing or
baseball.

    For months the TripleCast has been anticipated as a key
test of the fledgling pay-per-view concept, which could
eventually be used for a wide variety of sports events. Now the
outlook is cloudy. "These numbers are disappointing," said
TripleCast chief executive Jim Dolan, "and they probably don't
bode that well for alternative coverage like this."

    But other industry observers argued that the high-profile
TripleCast, despite its poor showing, could actually speed the
public's acceptance of pay-per-view. "NBC and Cablevision have
used the Olympics to promote the viability of pay-per-view,"
says Christopher Dixon, a media analyst for Paine Webber. "In
so doing, they've educated and helped build an audience for the
future." Barry Gould, publisher of Pay-Per-View Update, predicts
that the next Olympics will have a far more sophisticated array
of viewing options. "I think the technology will be in place to
offer the programming on a timed basis, like a toll call. You
turn on your television set, and then a meter starts running."
And if Letterman is still around, he'll have a field day.