Television How Much Is Too Much?

By Richard Zoglin

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.

With reporting by William Tynan