TV and Web: The Gab Around the RNC

Mentions and Social Comments Abound Around the RNC

8.31.2012—The Republican National Convention (RNC) has come to a close, but the event’s impact is still reverberating across television, as analysis and conjecture abounds regarding the speeches given. The events of the RNC’s 3rd night, have created quite a buzz on TV, keeping key republican names in Boxfish’s top trending spots on TV today.

On the day of his acceptance speech for the republican nomination, Mitt Romney was mentioned 4,248 times on TV, double the numbers he had in the days prior. Paul Ryan’s speech generated 1,132 mentions for the VP candidate on the day it was delivered, but jumped to 2,708 the following day. The speaker who received the third-most mentions on the day they spoke was Ann Romney, with 768 mentions on TV—the most she has received so far in 2012.

While making a splash on TV the night he spoke, Clint Eastwood’s speech about the “missing” Barack Obama, where he had a conversation with an empty chair on stage, gained him more mentions on TV today, a day after his speech, than all who spoke at the RNC, save for Mitt Romney. 

The RNC seized the web’s attention as well. AdAge published the social media activity revolving around the live broadcast of the RNC over the event’s 3 days. 

Twitter was the main medium of conversation online, with 1.9 of the 2 million social TV comments being tweeted. The remainder (104,000) were on Facebook, according to Ad Age and Bluefin Labs, who provided the data.

Over the 3-night event, Romney’s speech gained the most social media comments per minute, at 17,458. A close second was Clint Eastwood’s speech, which generated 16,193 comments per minute and the hashtag #eastwooding, defining the activity of having a conversation with an empty chair. Marco Rubio’s speech came in third with 13,286 comments per minute.

We will see how the opposition fares on TV and web, as the Democratic National Convention is just around the corner, and will surely have everyone talking. 

Convenient Monopoly Vs. Live TV Reality

People Still Want Live Olympic Coverage, Despite Tape-Delay Success

8.6.2012—NBC started off the Olympics with a rude awakening via social media when they announced that they would show the Olympic opening ceremony on tape delay. Twitter and Facebook was awash with negativity toward the event being postponed to air on primetime in the US, hours after the rest of the world watched it live. Many, including us, saw it as a sign that NBC was out of touch with the reality of TV viewing in the digital age.

However, since the negative tweets have subsided a bit, the opinions have been split. While criticism of NBC’s handling of the olympics, from commercial-heavy broadcasts to reporting the results of events they plan to show later on primetime, there ratings continue to skyrocket. 

Critics were later lambasted when the numbers came back, showing that NBC’s tape-delayed airing of the opening ceremony earned higher ratings than any opening ceremony the network aired in the past. 

Even from a social media aspect, apart from the PR nightmare of #NBCfail, the splash that a live event makes is just as much as NBC’s tape-delayed airing seems to be the same. Yesterday, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt solidified his title of “fastest man in the world” when he won the gold in the 100m track event. Lost remote reported that Bluefin Labs’ social TV data clocked the live event as generating nearly the same amount of social comments per minute.

So the question remains, is NBC doing it right in an age when the old model of TV is seen as something of a dinosaur? The network’s executive producer, Jim Bell, seems to think so, as Bell told the Hollywood Reporter that “the numbers speak for themselves” regarding ratings vs. the negative rhetoric surrounding their tape-delay. However, it should also be stated that NBC has exclusive rights to broadcast the Olympics in the US. 

Had there been live coverage of the events on another network, while NBC stuck to its tape-delayed method, would Jim Bell and NBC be so confident in their decisions? Maybe it is a hurried assumption that they would stick to that plan in the face of direct competition, but NBC’s handling of the Olympics is an Old Media way of providing content in the new age. While the monopoly on Olympic content lends itself to giving NBC these high ratings and $1 billion plus of ad revenue (even though they may only just break even), as the next wave of tech brings TV into a new age, this approach to content in the future may backfire in the face of old media.

The Wrath of the Internet: NBC and the Olympics

Tape Delayed Opening Ceremony Incurs Negative Attention From All Fronts

7.27.2012—As social media explodes with commentary of the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, equally gaining traction is how NBC is flexing its broadcast rights to the games by NOT showing the opening ceremony live. NBC plans to broadcast the event at 7 p.m. EST, five hours after the ceremonies originally began.

Everyone from Forbes to the LA Times is weighing in on the growing ire of Olympic fans that want to be in sync with the rest of the world that is viewing the ceremonies live, as it happens. 

NBC’s Olympic Facebook page is seeing the same rise in revulsion to the network’s handling of the opening ceremonies. They posted a graphic boasting over 200k likes for the page. In less than 5 hours after posting, the positive comments for anticipation of the Olympic kick off were a mere fraction of the 270 plus total comments expressing disappointment in NBC’s handling of the opening ceremonies.

NBC later posted a statement on their page, saying that the opening ceremonies are “entertainment spectacles” that is best suited to air on primetime. They precluded that sentiment by reminding Facebook viewers that they are still streaming all 32 sports and 302 medal events live on their NBCOlympics.com page and through their apps. They fail to mention that you can only access these live streams if you provide proof of a cable or satellite subscription which includes CNBC and MSNBC—no cable will only allow you to watch partial clips of those events.

One commenter really hit the nail on the head as to NBC’s huge misstep in its Olympic coverage and clearly displays the shackles of thought that plague Old Media thinking:

Rachel Leyland - “I think someone has grossly underestimated the reach and immediacy of social media here haven’t they NBC?…”

The comment above is the bigger story at hand. Old Media holdouts still try to control the stream of content in an age when they are not the sole viewing window to what is going on in the world. 

What NBC fails to realize is that the web, while many rush to monetize and curate it, is a public good which more people have access to every second. The openness of the web has created a culture where people are looking to connect to the content they want, when they want it, and discuss it with the rest of the world. All this, they want in real time. If you aren’t going to provide that, people will find it elsewhere. After they find it, they will tell everyone else how bad you suck at your job.

We’ll see how NBC’s delayed coverage of the ceremony compares to the live feeds that every other broadcaster in the world provided to their viewers. However, if the sports coverage will get delayed and tailored to advertisers instead of the viewership, this is the just the beginning in a gauntlet of negativity via social media.

The Olympics belongs to the world. Treat it as such.

Disagreeing With TV Content in the Modern Age

Pro Al-Assad Group Hacks Al-Jazeera’s AJStream Twitter Account

7.5.2012—In the new internet age, when TV shows occupy the same communication space as the voice against the content on that show, voicing opposition to that show could mean a very different thing. The “Syrian Electronic Army” showed just that when they hacked the twitter account of Al-Jazeera’s TV show, “The Stream,” a daily news program revolving around the social media activity and citizen journalism of current issues. 

The Syrian Electronic Army tweeted messages and links in support of Syria’s president, Bashar Al-Assad, using The Stream’s twitter handle, @AJStream. The Stream is just the latest of a list of 40-plus targets the hacker group attacked for sympathizing with Syrian rebel forces. 

As TV shows move toward a heavier presence online, this type of “speaking out” against certain programming may become par for the course. Even last year, the hacker group Lulzsec hacked the PBS News homepage in response to the Wikileaks story that Frontline broadcasted before the site was hacked. Lulzsec published a story on the homepage claiming that deceased rapper Tupac Shakur was actually alive and living in New Zealand. 

While the more notable examples of hacking in opposition of TV content has revolved around TV news, as TV content moves into the future, the twitter account of TV show celebrities, a disagreement about the decision of reality-show judges, or a distasteful commercial could earn content creators and all involved the ire of a hacker. The days of the angry letter sent to the TV station could be at its end. 

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