NBC will not be offering live online feeds of any events that will be broadcast on TV. The ones broadcast on TV will, of course, include the most popular events and the ones that people are most likely to tune into. The video of the events will be on NBC's site only after the events have been completed. With this in mind, it is clear that NBC views its online offering as a supplement to their TV broadcast and not as any sort of a replacement.
Many have been really quick to heavily criticize this move by NBC, but I'm not jumping on that bandwagon just yet. I am usually not one to defend old media (see my post on Why Broadcast TV Sucks), but I have some sympathy for NBC here. I applaud NBC for taking this major leap into the online distribution of this major event in the first place. It's an unfamiliar road and a departure from a model that has worked for NBC for a very long time.
Of course, we would love to see every live stream available to us, with videos and highlights that we could embed on other sites, but this may be too radical of a first step for NBC. Think of this year's Olympic webcast as testing the waters. If NBC's web offerings prove to be profitable this year, then maybe they will expand their offerings in years to come. The Olympics only happen every two years (the more popular Summer version every four) and I can understand NBC not wanting to gamble too much on this very costly venture.
An online feed of an event like the Olympics (or any sporting event for that matter) can offer all sorts of rich functionality, including realtime statistics, scores, and leaderboards. There is no doubt in my mind that rich functionality will eventually win out, whether it is viewed on your computer or through a new interface on your TV. If it doesn't look like they get it now, NBC and the other networks will eventually see the light, but these big companies may just need a little more time to make the switch at their own pace.
To view NBC's online Olympic offering, you must install Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in.
Don't believe the haters, NBC's online offering of the Olympics is a step in the right direction, just not two steps as a lot had hoped.
Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.
As we have seen, Netflix and NBC have a very solid working relationship, offering exclusive web content for the site in the past. Today, Netflix announced that it will offer episodes of hit NBC shows, such as Heroes, The Office, 30 Rock, and Friday Night Lights to its subscribers for instant viewing online.
Just to clarify, Netflix has offered instant viewing of various DVDs, including Heroes Season 1, prior to today, but now it will be making episodes that are currently unavailable on DVD available for viewing. This also marks the fourth way that you can see NBC shows online. NBC currently offers its shows on Hulu, NBC.com, NBC Direct, and now Netflix. It's nice to see that NBC is really forward thinking about Web distribution, now hopefully the Writer's Guild can get the strike settled so that they will be compensated for this content.
NBC and News Corp.'s new Internet video site Hulu is finally seeing the light of day. On Monday, Hulu finally launched the private beta of its site, which includes almost 100 different TV series and movies. After a number of delays, Hulu has its site out the door in October, as promised.
Hulu is a Web platform for viewing and sharing TV shows, movies, and clips. The programming selection (via NewTeeVee PDF) for Hulu on launch is pretty impressive. Content providers include Fox, NBC, E, Bravo, FX, SciFi, USA, and Universal. Hopefully, we will start to see some more TV networks and movie studios jump on this, because I'll admit that I was a little disappointed to see that a couple of my personal favorites, Lost and Adult Swim weren't included in the list.
Sharing videos in Hulu works a lot like YouTube in that you can e-mail videos to your friends, or toss it up on your own Web site via the embed feature. Hulu actually takes sharing one step further than YouTube. You can set start and stop points on the videos that you are sharing, so if you only want to share one scene, or a particularly good 20 seconds of a video, you can do that.
According to TechCrunch, like many of the TV networks' online video solutions, unfortunately Hulu will only make the most recent five episodes of a given series available. Given that I do not know the specific terms of the deals that the companies involved have with Hulu, in my mind, there is no reason for them to start pulling episodes after five weeks of being on the site. As long as they can serve up advertisements with the videos, I think that it would be beneficial to the users, Hulu, content providers, and advertisers to keep those videos up. Although I would imagine that this policy would be different for TV shows that have already run their course, such as Arrested Development.
Hulu is looking very promising, and I expect to see a lot of content providers jumping on the bandwagon in the near future. Being a private beta, it is very likely that features and functionality will change significantly between now and the official public launch. That said, I'm putting downloadable videos (with or without ads), formatted for computers and portable devices on the top of my wish list for future releases.
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