Almost Live? Not Even Close -- Tape Delay Is Order Of Day, But CBS Isn't Worried About Shelf Life
When it comes to Winter Olympic coverage, "live" is a four-letter word at CBS.
The television network, taking its third consecutive stab at beaming often-obscure winter sports to American living rooms from abroad, makes no bones about it. For West Coast Olympic fans, this month's games from Nagano, Japan, will be taped, period.
It's not unusual for the Olympics to be taped, edited, preserved and regurgitated later for prime-time viewing. But West Coast watchers of the Nagano games will get videotaped coverage with an unprecedented shelf life: From 12 to more than 20 hours for many events.
Even the network's short list of events broadcast live during prime time to the East Coast - specifically, the Opening Ceremony and men's and women's downhill skiing - will be tape-delayed three hours to fit into prime-time slots in Seattle, Los Angeles and the rest of the West.
Two culprits come to mind, and both are immovable objects. One is the globe itself. Because these games are on the opposite side of the earth, there's a 17-hour time difference between Nagano and Seattle, 14 hours between Nagano and the East Coast.
Events in Nagano at, say, 7 p.m. Friday will occur at 2 a.m. Friday Seattle, time - 5 a.m. in New York. Live broadcasts - an expensive proposition to begin with - would be lost on the vast majority of CBS viewers.
"The 14-hour time difference gives us the opportunity to do some events live or close to live," said Rick Gentile, CBS Olympics executive producer. (Example: men's hockey, some of which will be broadcast live to East Coast audiences on CBS's post-Letterman Olympics coverage at 1 a.m.) "The downside is that the events taking place outside the window (10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Nagano time) are going to be held for a long time."
But even many events that take place in that time window will be tape-delayed by CBS.
Which points to the second culprit - ratings. The network bid $375 million to broadcast 128 hours of Olympic events - 50 hours in prime time - over 16 days. Without a strong prime-time ratings boost and its accompanying high-priced ad slots, that's mostly money down the drain.
Even with big ratings for prime-time events, the games are expected to result in a fairly narrow profit margin (by modern media standards) for the network. Without good ratings, it's a big-time money loser. And CBS gets enough of that from its regular prime-time programming.
Besides, network executives say, it's not like Americans won't tune in to an Olympics spectacle merely because it's a day old. They point to the previous games in Lillehammer, Norway, where the women's figure-skating final, broadcast on tape delay about six hours after it ended, pulled the third largest ratings in sports-broadcasting history.
"The ratings obviously haven't suffered," Gentile said. "I don't think they will if they're held for a few hours longer, either."
Skeptics, however, note comparing Nagano to Lillehammer is mixing sushi with lutefisk. The skating final in Norway was an anomaly, thanks to the unprecedented focus of the freakish Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan debacle.
"Barring any unforeseen tire-iron attacks, we're not going to have that level of interest going into these Olympics," conceded Jim Nantz, the network's chief Olympic anchor.
Even if another story of that magnitude were to break in Nagano, the time lag leaves CBS with an unprecedented hold-their-interest challenge.
When Americans tuned in to watch the figure-skating final that night in 1994, they saw an event that at least had concluded that afternoon. Many could have found a way to avoid knowing the outcome. Only true hermits will be able to pull that off this time. The women's skating final will sit in the can for 12 hours before New Yorkers see it and for 15 hours before it airs in Seattle.
The fully day-old status of most Nagano events means they will have been reported, discussed, analyzed, commented upon and displayed in full-color 3-D graphics by hundreds of Web site producers - and competing broadcasters - before they reach prime time. CBS owns all the video, but even the slowest of modern media - such as this newspaper - will have time to offer full reporting, commentary, photos and recaps of Olympic events well before they appear on TV.
This doesn't faze Nantz and colleagues, who say these Olympics will be no different than past games in the number of unexpected, fascinating stories likely to unfold before network cameras. Obvious TV highlights include Friday's Opening Ceremony; the Michelle Kwan/Tara Lipinski figure-skating showdown Feb. 20; the men's and women's downhills Feb. 7 and 13; Alberto Tomba's last stand in the men's slalom Feb. 18; and the men's hockey final Feb. 21, Nantz said.
The coverage - which begins at 8 p.m. Seattle time most weekdays - will be fairly scripted, with pre-scheduled events for each day's broadcast. But the CBS schedule is more of a "game plan" than a to-the-letter mandate, Gentile said. If a particular sport catches the public's attention, CBS will attempt to ride the wave, he said.
"We've taken pride in our ability to keep a very loose format and react to the stories," Gentile said recently from Nagano.
CBS also is sensitive to the frequent criticism - leveled more often at Summer Olympic coverage by NBC - that U.S. networks offer only jingoistic, flag-waving coverage of prominent U.S. athletes, often ignoring compelling stories involving foreign competitors.
"That's never been CBS's style," Nantz said. "Our slogan is dead-on: `Share a Moment With the World.' People can be hooked and drawn to an athlete from anywhere in the world."
Gentile agreed. "If you go into the Winter Olympics saying you're going to cover just the American stories, you're going to have a very short broadcast," he said. "In our game plan, I'd say it's about 50-50 whether they're Americans. We're just not into flag-waving."
Still, perhaps largely because of the long broadcast delays, plenty of true Seattle Olympi-philes are likely to seek alternate coverage. Subscribers to many suburban cable systems can find it on Canada's CBUT, which will broadcast CBC's traditionally exhaustive coverage - much of it live, during daytime or early morning hours - throughout the Games.
Olympic fans without CBUT - and that includes the bulk of TCI's Seattle-area customers - will be stuck with CBS and cable station TNT, which has renewed an agreement with CBS for supplemental coverage. TNT will provide 50 hours, mostly of tape-delayed events, on weekday afternoons.
One advantage CBS has in this Olympics is hockey, which could be the boost the network needs. The presence of National Hockey League stars means the substantial North American NHL audience will have a keener-than-usual interest in Olympic hockey. CBS plans to take advantage by loading its weekday late-night, post-Letterman segment with all or part of nine "dream team" hockey matches, some broadcast live on the East Coast.
Letterman, in a long-running rating battle with NBC's Jay Leno, will be an important bridge between the network's prime-time and late-night coverage, and his show is wrapping itself in the Olympic flag.
Letterman's mother, Dorothy, will be shipped to Japan, where she'll reprise the role of wide-eyed late-night correspondent she established, quite charmingly, at the Lillehammer games. (Highlight: The night she asked First Lady Hillary Clinton if there was anything she could do about that pesky speed limit in Connecticut.) Son Dave will interview a half-dozen or so Olympic celebrities live throughout the games.
A full complement of CBS personalities - from the stuffy (Dan Rather) to the fluffy (Mark McEwen) also will be on hand to bolster the network's regular coverage (see related article).
Predictably, CBS will have the Japanese Alps around Nagano virtually wired for sight and sound, with a fully digital broadcast center and - thanks to the cooperation of friendly neighborhood Buddhist monks - a studio erected on the grounds of the city's seventh-century Zenkoji temple.
The network also promises "more and better" minicams, located everywhere from inside lane cones in the speedskating track to between skier's legs at the takeoff to the ski jump.
No word yet on whether CBS plans to bring us up close and personal with its studio hosts with the obvious next technological step: Monk Cam.
But remember when it blinks on, you read it here first - without even the slightest tape delay.
---------- TV players ----------
Key figures in CBS Sports' coverage of the Winter Olympics:
Prime-time host: CBS Sports anchor Jim Nantz, 38, who will broadcast from a three-tiered studio at the historic Zenkoji Temple in Nagano.
Morning anchors : Mark McEwen and Jane Robelot, hosts of CBS News' "This Morning."
Weekend daytime anchors: CBS Sports anchors Andrea Joyce and Bill Macatee.
Late-night anchor: Michele Tafoya.
Figure skating announcers: Verne Lundquist, Scott Hamilton and Tracy Wilson.
Men's hockey announcers: Sean McDonough and John Davidson.
Alpine skiing announcers: Tim Ryan, Christin Cooper, Mary Carillo and Ken Read.
Snowboarding/freestyle skiing announcer: Kennedy Montgomery, "MTV's house conservative."
------------------------------- Winter Olympic broadcast rights -------------------------------
A list of monies spent by networks for rights to telecast the Winter Olympics:
Year Site TV
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1960 Squaw Valley CBS
$394,000
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1964 Innsbruck ABC
$597,000
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1968 Grenoble ABC
$2.5 million
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1972 Sapporo NBC
$6.4 million
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1976 Innsbruck ABC
$10 million
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1980 Lake Placid ABC
$15.5 million
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1984 Sarajevo ABC
$91.5 million
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1988 Calgary ABC
$309 million
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1992 Albertville CBS
$243 million
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1994 Lillehammer CBS
$300 million
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1998 Nagano CBS
$375 million
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2002 Salt Lake City NBC
$545 million
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2006 TBA NBC
$613 million
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