Olympics Triplecast - Legacy

Legacy

Even before the Olympics started, many criticized the business model. On July 16, nine days before the Opening Ceremony, one Philadelphia Inquirer writer called it "the biggest marketing disaster since New Coke". The Triplecast was deemed by the New York Times "sports TV's biggest flop" and that NBC and Cablevision were "bereft in sanity" in operating it. By 1994, it was referred to as "the Heaven's Gate of television". Albert Kim, the editor of Entertainment Weekly, went on National Public Radio and called it "an unmitigated disaster for NBC". It was a loss of about $100 million (half of which was covered by Cablevision under agreement) for the two parties. It also shaped NBC's strategies in the coverage of future Olympics.

• NBC did not use pay-per-view to cover any future games. While NBC alone broadcast the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in the United States, NBC decided to use cable television partners for its subsequent telecasts. CNBC and MSNBC showed the 2000 Summer Games and 2002 Winter Games along with NBC, and three newer acquisitions (Bravo and USA Network in English and Telemundo in Spanish) joined the coverage for the 2004 Summer Games. Universal HD was added for the 2006 Winter Games. This arrangement continued, with Oxygen taking the place of Bravo for the 2008 Games, and excluded from the 2010 Games due to a lack of programming (NBC's digital subchannel Universal Sports began to air analysis shows during those Games). The NBC Sports Network will show all U.S. Olympic events in the 2012 Olympic Games. NBC has the U.S. rights to the Olympics through 2020 (CBS, which had the broadcast rights to the 1994 and 1998 Winter Olympic Games, also used a cable partner, TNT).
• For the 2008 Summer Olympics, NBC offered to cable operators the NBC Olympic Basketball Channel and NBC Olympic Soccer Channel, which broadcast exclusively in high definition and aired all the events in both sports without commercial interruptions at all. During halftimes and before each game, a wide-angle shot of the venue from the default world feed was shown instead along with highlights without commentary, while non-programming hours consisted of rolling statistics or a test pattern. The network plans to utilize the same setup in for the 2012 Games.
• During the 2008 Summer Olympics, NBC also streamed 2,200 hours of 25 different sports live on NBCOlympics.com. Most events shown on NBCOlympics.com were shown with no commentary.