Why ESPN's Olympic Bluster is Bogus

ESPN's John Skipper has been getting a lot of play for his sour-grapes boast that his network, which is angling to carry the Olympics in 2014 and 2016, will one-up NBC by airing all the competitions live, regardless of the hour of the day. "We serve sports fans," Skipper, ESPN's executive vice president for content, tells The New York Times. "It's hard in our culture to fathom tape-delaying in the same way [NBC has with the Beijing games]. I'm not suggesting it wasn't the smart thing for them to do, but it's not our culture."

Skipper presumably wants us to admire him, along with parent company Disney, and sister network ABC, for their willingness to give the people what they want, man, even if it means sacrificing the huge ratings and ad revenues NBC Universal's now enjoying.

But it's a phony magnanimity since, as eMarketer predicted, nearly 25 percent of all viewing will be time-shifted or viewed on something other than a TV by 2012. In an on-demand world, not only is there no point in sequestering big events until prime time, it's actually quite costly, since you devote countless man-hours to trying to plug all the holes in the dike until your chosen hour. (Indeed, in some ways the big story of this Olympics has been how successful NBC has been at this sisyphean task.) So essentially Skipper is promising that Disney/ABC/ESPN, should it get the Olympics, won't turn back time by a decade or more in a way it couldn't do even if it wanted to. Gosh, thanks.