Call it #NBCfail if you want to, but the combined networks of NBC Universal managed to turn the London 2012 Olympics into the most-watched event in television history, according to the number-crunchers at the Nielsen Company.
NBC was pummeled by viewers who took to social media after the network cut away early from the closing ceremonies of the London Games on Sunday to air a new television show, drawing outrage from those who tuned in for the highly anticipated musical spectacle.
The 2012 Summer Olympics are in the home stretch this week, but for the network airing them the games have just begun.
updated: Fri Aug 03 2012 09:07:00
Track star Sanya Richards-Ross talks about her Olympic hopes and getting over her past defeats.
It all started out quite innocently, with jokes about the Queen's perma-frown and GIF collections of weird, what-the-Dickens moments from the opening ceremony.
updated: Wed Aug 01 2012 13:30:00
A Swiss soccer player was expelled from the London Games for sending a racist message on Twitter about South Koreans.
Steven Marx wasn't that mad. And with only 17 Twitter followers, the 48-year-old certainly wasn't popular when he reportedly created the #NBCFail hashtag.
updated: Wed Aug 01 2012 12:13:00
NBC gets more criticism after a "Today" promo announces Missy Franklin's gold medal win before her race aired.
updated: Wed Aug 01 2012 10:38:00
Guy Adams Twitter account was temporarily suspended after he tweeted the e-mail address of an NBC executive.
It would take you almost five solid months -- without sleeping or bathroom breaks -- to watch every sporting event at this year's Summer Olympics. More than 3,500 hours of competition from London will be crammed into just 17 days.
updated: Tue Jul 31 2012 19:49:00
CNN's Atika Shubert gets some advice from locals on how to deal with London's notoriously fickle weather.
Guy Adams, the Los Angeles-based journalist whose Twitter account was suspended after blasting NBC over its Olympics coverage, is tweeting again after being reinstated on the site.
A journalist who has criticized NBC's coverage of the London Olympics has been suspended from Twitter after using the site to publish a network executive's private e-mail address and urge followers to message him.
It's not easy being NBC, which is touting record ratings for its first three doses of prime-time Summer Olympics coverage while at the same time getting hammered in some quarters for its time-delayed approach.
Unlike NBC, other TV networks aren't hoping to attract more than 200 million viewers as the London Olympics unfolds throughout the next 16 days.
Conventional webmaster wisdom holds that changing the name of a website leads to a drop in its popularity.
Television viewers have long relied on broadcasters to provide analysis and explanations about the often-questionable decisions made by NBA referees.
We've been hard at work on EW's big Summer TV Preview issue that's on stands this week and have admittedly been slipping on covering the morning broadcast ratings.
(Each month SI.com highlights people in the sports media who have proved newsworthy, both for positive and negative achievements. Since this column has been away the past two months, let's call this the spring media power list)
Three Thursday night dramas were greeted with larger audiences for their final episodes of the season, but one NBC comedy tied its all-time low.
With the fall TV schedule now complete, we get to step back and take a look at the hellish battleground that broadcast hath wrought.
NEW YORK -- With mascots (Brutus Buckeye, Albert E. Gator, and KC Wolf), a marching band (The Ohio State University Marching Band) and a mélange of on-air talent (Mike Greenberg, Jon Gruden, Sage Steele among others), ESPN held its annual upfront presentation Tuesday afternoon at the Best Buy Theater in New York's Times Square. What are upfronts? It's a network's attempt to woo marketers and media planners to support its upcoming summer and fall schedule, and part of the sell job includes plying said business people with food and entertainment.
NBC is going to the White House for laughs this fall.
The NHL wants you to believe that it's on the upswing as a television property, and its biggest selling point is the Stanley Cup Final. Last year's Game 7 between the Bruins and Canucks was the most-watched NHL game in 38 years, a broadcast that drew 8.4 million U.S. viewers and jumped seven percent from the final game of the Stanley Cup of 2010, which saw the Blackhawks defeat the Flyers in six games.
What is the value of having a soccer analyst on the pitch? It's a question MLS viewers will soon be able to weigh in on as NBC's MLS coverage begins Sunday at 3 p.m. ET on the NBC Sports Network.
There is no sweeter scenario for a Super Bowl broadcaster than a game hanging in the balance, and NBC's ratings for the Giants' 21-17 victory over the Patriots on Sunday will almost assuredly top last year's Super Bowl on FOX, which averaged 111 million viewers and became the most-watched television program in U.S. history. But how was the NBC broadcast for viewers? It's time to hand out grades.
Suppose they held an election, and the economy got better. Just last month, the jobless rate fell to its lowest level in almost three years.
When kickoff comes to Lucas Oil Stadium this Sunday at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, Fred Gaudelli and Drew Esocoff will be together as always, sitting 23 inches apart inside an NBC production truck below the stadium. The duo -- Gaudelli is the producer for the Super Bowl and Esocoff will direct the game -- has been focused on Super Bowl XLVI for months.
Evaluating sports broadcasting talent is subjective. We each have our favorites. I like Mike Mayock. You like Phil Simms. We all dislike Craig James. While discussing NFL broadcasters over coffee a couple of months ago, James Andrew Miller, the author of the best-selling "These Guys Have All The Fun: Inside The World Of ESPN," and I decided it would be fun to pick the 10 people in NFL broadcasting circles who we considered the most indispensable to their networks. (You can follow Miller on Twitter at @ESPNBOOK).
Good things come to those who wait.
SI.com highlights a select group in the sports media who were newsworthy, both for positive and negative reasons, in 2011.
Summing up the drama with 17 games left in the NFL season:
If you are looking to determine the winners and losers from Wednesday's announcement that the NFL had extended television deals with CBS, Fox and NBC, we'll make it easy for you:
LOS ANGELES -- John Harkes is out and Taylor Twellman is in as ESPN's lead analyst in the booth for MLS and U.S. Soccer broadcasts in 2012, several sources have told SI.com. Harkes, the U.S. Hall of Famer who played in two World Cups, was recently informed that his contract would not be renewed. Twellman, the former New England Revolution star whose playing career was cut short by concussions, has spent this season working in ESPN's studio coverage and as the analyst for local broadcasts of the Philadelphia Union.
What's the biggest win in the 10 seasons of the Houston Texans?
updated: Mon Oct 17 2011 17:52:00
The attorney for the family of missing 11-month-old Lisa Irwin says they won't be giving any more media interviews.
The mother of Lisa Irwin, an 11-month old Missouri girl missing for nearly two weeks, said in an interview she was drunk the night the infant disappeared.
Next Wednesday is one of the most important days of the next decade for soccer in the United States. That's when bids are due in Zürich, Switzerland, for the U.S. broadcast rights for World Cups '18 and '22. ESPN, NBC and Fox are expected to bid for the English-language rights, while Univisión and NBC-owned Telemundo are expected to be in competition for the Spanish-language rights. After the bids are submitted on Wednesday -- there will be no formal presentations, as there were for the Olympic rights bids earlier this year -- the FIFA executive committee will meet on Thursday and could reach a decision on the winners as soon as that day.
Hackers accessed the Twitter account for NBC News on Friday and posted false messages about a fresh attack on New York's ground zero.
The 'Bag (soccer version) is back, and we'll start this week with a question from @WillEhrenfeld: "Will Robbie Keane be an effective scorer for L.A.? And does his addition make the Galaxy clear favorites going forward?"
1. Phil Steele, eponymous college football editor and publisher: For hardcore college football fans, the name above represents glorious information overload. There are plenty of college football preview magazines in the marketplace but none whose annual debut is more anticipated from fans (and media members) the way Steele's is. His 328-page preview guide is, as the man himself likes to say, "120 media guides rolled into one." One of the most notable and appreciated aspects of his guide is that he gives the same amount of coverage to Florida Atlantic that he does Florida.
If you are a fan of Major League Soccer, today is a very good day for you.
Amid all the tiresome discussion of whether the loss to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga bodes ill for Roger Federer, I'm surprised only passing mention has been made of the fact Federer had only 11 unforced errors over the course of a five-set match, including a tiebreaker! Has any player ever lost a five-setter while making 11 or fewer unforced errors? -- Peter Repetto, Toronto
(Each month SI.com highlights those in the sports media who have proved newsworthy, both for positive and negative achievements.)
Comcast/NBC will remain the U.S. Olympic network in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020. But for now, it's time to focus on 2012.
As the Comcast/NBC presentation neared its conclusion Tuesday morning at the International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, Bob Costas stepped to the front of the room to deliver the emotional highlight of the allocution.
The Peacock is shelling out a whopping $4.38 billion for the rights to broadcast the Olympic Games through 2020.
Some scattered thoughts from the 2011 French Open, delivered stateside:
The inch-and-a-quarter thick document sat dormant on the shelf of a cluttered library for a decade, but last week, upon prodding by a reporter, Mike Emrick dusted off his doctoral dissertation and proceeded to tell the story of how Ernie Harwell became his nonacademic adviser.
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. -- The last time I swung a golf club was a year ago, at the 2010 Tom Coughlin Jay Fund Celebrity Golf Classic, in which, I'm sure, I was the worst golfer on the famed Stadium Course at Sawgrass. That is trouble for the foursome that gets me as a golfer this morning at the 2011 Tom Coughlin Jay Fund Celebrity Golf Classic. Let's just say Sterling Sharpe, one of the real golfers today, won't be looking for me on the leaderboard.
(Each month SI.com highlights a selected group in the sports media who have proven newsworthy, both for positive and negative achievements.)
The Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice on Tuesday approved -- with several conditions -- a merger of the country's largest cable operator, Comcast, and broadcasting company NBC Universal.
The finale of season 10, which has been as much about gaining heart as losing weight, airs Tuesday
For the better part of a decade, superheroes on the big screen have been big business ("Iron Man 2" the most recent example). On TV, however, keeping audiences coming back each week for the exploits of those with superpowers has been a far trickier task. It's been a long time since "Batman," "Wonder Woman," "The Incredible Hulk" and "The Greatest American Hero" hit prime time.
1. Mark Pain, sports photographer, Mail on Sunday (U.K.): Along with creating one of the most memorable images in recent history -- Tiger Woods shanking a ball during the Ryder Cup directly into his camera -- Pain also created a global phenomenon thanks to a mustachioed mystery man with a cigar in the background of his photo. The famed face in the crowd -- now identified as 30-year-old South London-based investment analyst Rupesh Shingadia -- created a Photoshopping sensation worldwide and entered the phrase "Cigar Guy" into our lexicon. How did the photographer land the shot? Click here for Pain's interview with CBS' The Early Show.
EVANSTON, Ill. -- Drew Crawford was born 10 minutes from Northwestern, where he's now a 6-foot-5 sophomore guard. He lived the first three years of his life in Evanston, then moved to nearby Naperville, where he grew up paying little attention to college basketball. He's an NBA kid, and this is understandable -- his father, Danny, started his 26th season of refereeing in the league by working the much-anticipated Heat-Celtics opener on Tuesday. Drew is nostalgic about the early, up-close access he had to the pros, and he emerged from the Wildcats' locker room for an interview late last week wearing a vintage "NBA on NBC" hat.
NBC continues to flail in last place, with new shows like "Outlaw" and "Undercovers" bombing and veterans like "The Office" eroding. Jace Lacob offers six possible ways to save the Peacock.
One month into the season, three shows have been canceled and at least nine more are on life support. So what went wrong?
Stephen Burke will become the new head of NBC Universal once Comcast assumes control of the media giant, the companies said Sunday.
There's only one thing for sure about the future of the NBC network and that is that it will have to go on without current president and chief executive officer of NBC Universal, Jeff Zucker.
A bevy of stars will take part in a one-hour television special Friday night to raise funds for cancer research.
updated: Sun Sep 12 2010 16:40:00
We watch all the Sunday political shows so you don't have to. The best soundbites from September 12, 2010.
updated: Sun Jul 25 2010 15:08:00
CNN's Candy Crowley talks to Mort Zuckerman and Steve Forbes about letting tax cuts for the rich expire.
Glee, Modern Family, Mad Men and 30 Rock will vie for TV's top honor
Q: Who are you? How do you define yourself?
Does your television take up a high percentage of your living room? Have you ever bailed out on plans to cook dinner to watch an episode of "Lost"? Do you run into situations where your DVR gets overloaded because there are too many shows you want to record?
NBC learned fairly quickly that Jay Leno at 10 p.m. was not hitting the sweet spot with viewers.
Like Conan O'Brien before him, the NBC star will emcee this year's telecast on Aug. 29
Should celebrity chefs stick to stand-and-stir shows?
The Winter Olympics are basically a TV show, and thus NBC, which has become the New Jersey Nets of networks, actually won the Games' most important gold medal Feb. 17 -- podiumed as we, unfortunately, actually, say now -- when it whipped "American Idol" in the ratings.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Each morning here at 7:30, inside a compound at the International Broadcasting Center roughly the size of Belarus, NBC Olympics Chairman Dick Ebersol gathers a small flock of his key lieutenants to discuss contingency plans and every possible scenario for that day's coverage. Along with everything else on the agenda for the tired executives and producers, Ebserol preaches one mantra:
Is there anything more frustrating for a sports fan than watching the Olympics? Every night I feel like I'm sitting down with a great book, and after I read the first 10 pages, I discover that pages 11 to 25 have been crossed out, and then I'm supposed to skip to page 102, and by the way, I inadvertently read the ending nine hours ago.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- So much for the archetype of the quiet and reserved Canadian. On the eve of the Vancouver Games, which will see 5,500 athletes from 82 countries compete for 258 medals, this city is overflowing with boosterism, positivism and optimism. Its rainy streets are filled with flapping Maple Leafs as well as a flapping Canadian media crowing about Team Canada's chances for medal success.
If you're looking for someone to blame for NBC's late-night horror show, take aim at the network, Jay Leno told Oprah Winfrey on Thursday in an exclusive interview.
NBC has been the butt of nearly every joke in late night this week, and many of them were aired on NBC itself.
Speculation is rampant that Conan could go to another network and face off against Leno and Letterman
Jay Leno couldn't salvage NBC's prime-time ratings. Now the network is making bets on high-profile producers to perform triage next season.
With shows such as "American Idol" and "Glee," network executives at Fox appear to be tapping into the types of programming that television audiences want.
It's unlikely that NBC will lay down any final edicts about the fate of "The Jay Leno Show" before the start of the Television Critics Association's press tour on Sunday, but one thing is certain: NBC only made a bad situation worse by moving the late-night host to prime time instead of investing in scripted shows.
updated: Fri Jan 08 2010 09:13:00
CNN's Anderson Cooper talks to The New Yorker's Ken Auletta on potential changes in NBC's talk show lineup.
How do I break this to you gently?
A first thought upon hearing that Comcast is buying NBC Universal from GE? "Oh my God, will this be the end of "30 Rock?"
All the world's a stage, Shakespeare wrote long before television came into view.
NBC Universal looks to be in play, with minority shareholder Vivendi considering shedding its stake and Comcast, and now undoubtedly others, kicking the tires.
Comcast Corp. has denied news reports that it was hammering out a deal to buy entertainment giant NBC Universal from its parent General Electric.
If NBC Universal was an independent media group -- rather than part of financial-industrial conglomerate General Electric -- would "30 Rock" just have won another five Emmy Awards? For that matter, would the sitcom lampooning life at a television variety show on a network controlled by GE even have aired?
BOSTON (AP) -- The NHL and NBC have agreed to a two-year extension of their television contract that will keep the league on the network from the 2010 Winter Classic at Fenway Park through the end of the 2010-11 season.
Rivals.com and Scout.com provide Sports Nation with an invaluable service: They keep us up-to-date, as we should be, on the top high school prospects being recruited for student-athlete status at our institutions of higher learning.
1. Contrary to the certainty of conspiracy theorists across the land, Gary Bettman and his nefarious band of henchmen are not pulling strings to ensure a win for either Pittsburgh or Washington on Saturday. You can bet, however, that they're crossing their fingers for a specific result -- not so much an entertaining match featuring highlight reel moments from both Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin. They're just praying that the game ends in regulation.
BEIJING -- Television executives as a rule are an over-caffeinated bunch. They spit out platitudes with machine-gun frequency and sell their content with the same fervor Barnum sold his circus. That's why it's always interesting to check in with NBC Sports and Olympics officials during the second week of an Olympic Games. It's a dog-tired group, gutting out the final days after a month of little sleep. They've read the critics -- the NBC press office onsite gets faxed copies of every major publication daily -- and monitored the ratings with the circumspectness of a jeweler. If the news is good, you'll find smiles through the yawns.
No broadcaster shows how fast and far digital media has come than the U.S. network NBC Universal's plans for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. In the 2006 Turin Winter Games, NBC streamed only one hockey game online. This year, NBC will stream 2,200 hours of 25 events live, with nearly the entire 4,000 hours of the games available on archive for North American Internet users.
NBC Universal has settled a $105 million lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed a televised sex sting by "Dateline NBC: To Catch A Predator" drove her brother to kill himself
In the aftermath of the writer's strike - and with ever-increasing competition from the Internet, cable channels and digital video recorders - primetime network television isn't the all-powerful medium it used to be.
A new site named Hulu actually makes you want to watch TV shows online
When Fox and NBC Universal announced last March that they would join forces to put their TV shows online, the pundits of Silicon Valley howled with derision. Old media doesn't get the Internet, they said. Michael Arrington, the influential editor of TechCrunch, rattled off the reasons the project would never succeed and suggested that Fox and NBC quickly name their joint venture before it got stuck with the moniker insiders at Google had reportedly given it: Clown Co.
On the surface, the Writers Guild strike was a showdown between writers and suits over compensation from new methods of distributing content. But, looking back over the three-month walkout, it also provided handy cover for the powers that be to derail the creative community's gravy train and rethink the way TV shows are made.
So NBC, the network that carries the NHL in the United States that you don't need a Sherpa to find, is Peacock proud of its new flex scheduling. That's a fabulous way to spin that it has dropped regional games -- that were siphoning off the bottom line -- in favor of a single national game.
updated: Tue Jan 22 2008 11:42:00
From the NY film critics circle awards, honorees give their view of the writers strike in Hollywood.
For the first several years of its existence, the Golden Globes -- like many other Hollywood awards -- were an insular affair. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which began presenting the awards in 1944, was content to rent a ballroom at a local hotel, hand out trophies to stars or their representatives and generally sponsor a good time.
Every so often, events and a product converge with almost mystical perfection. Latest case in point: Just in time for spring training, Eternal Image of Farmington Hills, Mich., will introduce its line of officially licensed Major League caskets. Carrying a suggested price tag of $4,499, they follow the company's popular line of urns bearing team logos and colors.
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