Originally posted at The Roar
We’re well into the thick of the competition in Sochi, Russia for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, with Australian and international superstars competing on the biggest winter sports stage, but, aside from a few notable examples, it’s been a rough beginning for Channel Ten, whose much-trumpeted coverage has not even come close to living up to the high expectations set for it leading up to the Opening Ceremony early on Saturday morning.
I must start by saying that coverage of the Opening Ceremony itself, and the build-up was well done. Mel McLaughlin is a solid host, and anchors a strong team of expert commentators and the usual Ten faces – Mark Howard, for example – and the trio who called proceedings inside the impressive Fisht Olympic Stadium. Gordon Bray, Alisa Camplin and Sandra Sully did a good job, despite the fact that they were hamstrung by calling the event from a monitor back in Melbourne.
Things started to fall apart early on Day One of coverage (Saturday afternoon, Australian time). In amongst an avalanche of highlights from the Opening Ceremony were constant replays of mogul and snowboard-slopestyle qualifying events that were staged the day before the Opening Ceremony.
I’ve watched either live or on delay a giant chunk of the twin offerings on Channel Ten and One and enough of the live streams on TenPlay to get the gist of what’s going on with the broadcast in it’s early stages, and I’m confounded by the strategy in three areas:
Replays of old events: It should be a television crime to do this when there is live action taking place. Sure, most people might not be interested in the skiathalon event, but it’s Olympic action, it’s live, and if Channel Ten are serious about delivering the best coverage of a Winter Olympics ever – as their promos suggest that they are – then why can’t we see live sport? If the Opening Ceremony was that important, why wasn’t there a mid-afternoon replay on Saturday that wouldn’t clash with live sport?
Once again, it appears that the Australian network broadcasting the Olympics are more interested in showing our athletes compete. Now don’t get me wrong, because that’s a great thing to see our representatives, but I do question how many times we need to see Torah Bright’s run down the slopestyle course. We need to strike a happy balance here, because right now we’re losing out on live events for something that most Australians have already seen or else don’t want to see.
The key thing here is that these aren’t the Winter Olympics of Nagano, Japan or Salt Lake City, USA. This is Sochi, Russia and it’s 2014. A giant chunk of Australia’s population has a recorder of some sort – be it a TiVo, a Foxtel IQ, a regular DVD recorder or even, perhaps, an old-school VCR machine – and have likely managed to either record the events that were two days old by Saturday, or else had seen them one of the dozen and a half times they’ve been shown on multiple channels.
The same goes for the Opening Ceremony. People either watched or recorded or saw the important bits on Ten’s Eyewitness News – sadly, there wasn’t nearly enough footage of the Australians, but that’s what you get from a worldwide feed, where the director sensibly caters to teams that are far bigger and will have far more of an impact on the medal tally than Australia will – and did not need a primetime replay, particularly not whilst there were live events going on.
If there’s live sport coming out of Sochi, there should be no reason why a highlights package or Australian commentators previewing an event that’s hours away or Ten filling the air with pre-packaged features (again, probably ones we’ve seen a half-dozen times already) takes precedence. A quick search of social media – particularly the comments left on the Sochi On Ten Facebook page – would suggest that I’m not alone with this complaint.
Advertisements: Honestly, it’s a wonder we’ve seen any of the action with the amount of advertisements that saturate the broadcast. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the aim of this game is to give Channel Ten valuable exposure for it’s blue-chip products airing “after the Olympics” and to collect fat pay-checks from advertisers who want to see their products advertised early and often, knowing that there will be a lot of eyeballs focused.
The problem is that you run the risk of alienating viewers, who’ve already seen six hundred and twelve advertisements for The Biggest Loser or The Project, and who aren’t looking forward to making that six hundred and thirteen.
Viewers switching off due to ad saturation, that’s counter-productive for Ten in two ways: advertisers won’t pay nearly as much for product placement if the ratings figures are shown to be taking a dip, and Ten won’t get their much-hoped-for eyeballs on their big shows once the Olympics are over.
It seems that people are getting burnt out after one or two days…so imagine what it’ll be like come the closing ceremony? Ten needs to work on this. I know Ten’s paid a large fortune for these rights, but you won’t recoup money if people are turning off in frustration.
The most frustrating aspect, however, is how the ads cut into live sport. I watched
USA vs. Finland and Canada vs. Switzerland on Saturday night/Sunday morning, and when there was a stoppage for icing or a puck out of play, Ten/One would immediately go to a long ad, which would be better suited for between periods or during those amazing things known as television time-outs. Forty-five seconds or a minute later, the vision comes back on and, voila, we’ve missed live play. Commentary is re-joined sometimes with the announcer mid-sentence. Sooner or later, we’re going to miss a goal, and watch social media reaction then.
Same goes for the speed skating. Saturday night’s presentation of men’s long track 5000m heats featured advertisement breaks following the conclusion of one heat, but the breaks were so long that the next glimpse of speed-skating we saw was thirty seconds into the next race, with no real indication of who was who.
Either Channel Ten has someone directing advertisements who doesn’t understand the sports being broadcast or someone who doesn’t care. Either way, it’s not a good look. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that’s going to make diehard fans who want to see a full heat or a whole game switch off television and start looking for other means of watching these Olympics. Again, not good for Ten’s bottom dollar.
Commentary: Between the continuous packages on the athlete’s village and other human interest-type stories, I’m frustrated by the choice of commentators for sports where there obviously aren’t enough Australian experts to go around, and by so many events being called from monitors in Melbourne, which takes away a commentator’s ability to describe what’s going on around them, perhaps in the crowd, the marshalling area, wherever. There’s just no substitute for being there.
However, my major complaint is with the early coverage of (ice) hockey, which seems to have been given short shrift by Channel Ten, despite featuring the sport in a heap of Sochi 2014 previews.
Thanks to Twitter, anyone in love with the game has probably two dozen different ways to discover that the voice of hockey in America, Mike ‘Doc’ Emrick and the brilliant NHL on NBC Sports crew were broadcasting the Team USA women in their Olympic opener, a 3-1 victory over Finland, yet Ten decided to let us hear the not-so-dulcet tones of a lone English commentator who was forever a step behind the play. Worse, he had no analyst to break down the plays.
There were awkward moments of silence, and I shudder to wonder what might happen when the men take the ice, for their brand of play is obviously a little faster.
It’s hard to learn the players and the IIHF rule nuances from a guy who’s clearly struggling to keep up with the game. I’m of the opinion that you need at least a two-man commentary team for hockey, and there are no better broadcasters in the world than those working the NHL.
If not NBC, whom I know have a programming connection to the Seven Network in Australia, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) have sent their NHL crew to Sochi, featuring the lead voices of the venerable Hockey Night in Canada – think the Maple Leaf version of Friday Night Football in Australia, but with decades more tradition – Jim Hughson and Craig Simpson.
It would be great to hear their veteran, knowledgeable voices instead of a lone guy who isn’t going to elevate the big games into the stratosphere that Doc Emrick or Dave Strader or Jim Hughson has the ability to do.
Another common complaint surrounds the multiple TenPlay online streams, to which viewers are having limited and mixed success connecting to, but that’s another story for another day.
Thankfully, we’re only early in the Olympics, so there’s room for improvement in the broadcast
Follow me on Twitter @akitchener
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