NBC boss blamed Olympics ratings on Facebook and Snapchat in stunningly out-of-touch comments
'Millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble'
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Your support makes all the difference.Nineteen days and 306 events later and the 2016 Olympics are over, Team GB now back home having broken records in Rio.
However, while the BBC did a relatively sterling job of covering the games live (minus a few presenting hiccups), over in the US, those who wanted to watch live were unable to do so thanks to NBC’s bizarre broadcasting schedule.
Instead of showing events as they were happening NBC - who paid $12 billion to host the Olympics until 2032 - elected to hold off live broadcasting in order to present ‘Must See TV’ events in which the highlights were all presented in one programme as if they were live.
This includes the women’s gymnastics, which took place in the afternoon but were held from being broadcast until the late evening.
In a climate of Twitter and breaking news, chances are this situation was never going to appeal to those with access to the internet.
An interview highlighted by Vocative has pointed to an NBC bosses’ backwards views on “millennials” and how it’s their fault viewership was down 17% from four years ago.
“We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent,” NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke previous said at a conference. “If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it.”
Funnily enough, American millennials were invested in the Olympics, so much so that they didn’t want to wait all day to find out the results and just watched online via news outlets.
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