You know the drill.
You turn on your laptop and open the Internet, boom! The headline reads, “USA women take gold.”
Great. Where is the drama now, NBC? This is the modern dilemma with all tape-delayed sporting events. With spectacles like the Olympics and World Cup soccer matches taking place around the world at all hours of the day, gone are the days of dramatic tension for American fans.
You rarely have families crowded around their TV sets after dinner sweating out every minute of a game or meter of a race anymore. Why?
Because they already know who won.
With everyone on the Internet or tuned into constantly updated news coverage, avoiding hearing about a sporting result either directly — or indirectly from someone else — is almost impossible.
NBC is planning on showing more coverage of the Beijing Olympics than any previous Games. They have planned to broadcast an astonishing 3,600 hours between cable and Internet media in an attempt to bring more live events to the viewers.
Except for a few hours a day during primetime viewership, most fans will be sleeping, working or busy with other activities. So for all those fans that won’t be able to see it live, the results are sure to be leaked to them before they can rush home to their DVRs.
Even the DVR isn’t foolproof. If you try and multi-task by checking your e-mail and text messages, the result of a good game may be ruined before you have fast-forwarded your way out of the first 10 minutes.
Then there is the evil “live” button which, if accidentally hit either by you or an unsuspecting pet, may catapult you straight to the live action even if you haven’t caught up to it yet.
This issue often comes into play with British events that start in the early morning hours on the West Coast, like Wimbledon for tennis or last week’s Open Championship for golf.
So I leave you with this advice. When you set your TV to record the 400-meter dash in next month’s Olympics, be sure to leave it on mute so you don’t accidentally hear anything when you turn it on later. When you start watching it later be sure to turn away before you get the recording going, so you don’t catch a glimpse of anything live going on.
Be careful what websites you visit, don’t talk to anyone who may spoil it and most importantly, be excited when something remarkable and totally unexpected happens because the chances of that are getting smaller all the time.
