Why Teens Are Skipping The Olympics
Aug 12th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: Featured Story, Internet TV, Video 
Teens are skipping the Olympics this year, according to Wired, because the Olympics aren’t available where they are watching video:
“Only 46 percent of teens surveyed by Harris Interactive showed any interest in watching the Olympics.
Why won’t they watch? According to Harris, it’s ‘Because it’s not convenient for them.’
‘Teens want quick-hitting videos,” says Bill Carter, a partner at youth marketing agency Fuse Marketing. “They don’t want the lead-up and they don’t want the analysis. They just want the video.'”
Last week, we noted some of the barriers that face people wanting to follow the Olympics online:
- The Olympics and its partners are restricting what you can watch online, because they’d rather have you watch it on broadcast television.
- The Olympics and its partners restrict where you can watch, limiting viewing based on geography.
- The Olympics and its partners restrict how you can watch – NBC, for example, forces you to install Microsoft’s Silverlight before you can view videos.
- The Olympics has banned podcasting, video podcasting and other forms of citizen media from the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
These restrictions may limit teens more than others, because:
- teens are heavy YouTube users, and YouTube users watch less TV;
- teens are leading the way in abandoning broadcast television; and
- when teens do watch regular television, they are paying less attention because they are multitasking.
If teens really are skipping the Olympics because it’s not available where they spend their time, this could force major changes to how future games are covered online.
So … broadcast TV and the IOC have shot themselves in the foot.
I’m not the least bit sorry.
While YouTube video is rarely of any higher quality or more more compelling than broadcast TV (an understatement, to be sure) , at least YouTube viewers aren’t chained to a big box that’s spewing forth the usual tired entertainment formulas.
With “commercial” breaks between the start of a pole vaulters run and when they finally land, alone or with the bar skewering them, its not the thrill of victory we see, (there’s only one per event) or the agony of defeat which isn’t dramatic enough (its not the “Being Eaten By A Crocodile” event, where today’s world class athlete are tomorrow’s pile of crocodile shit.)
The Olympics had a good run but now we get YouTube videos of skateboarders with broken arms when they wipe out.
Where’s the fun in watching a bunch of coddled jocks doing heavily politicized and commercialized crap, somewhere far away and about a dial’s worth delay on the clock?
Here is something that could draw teens back to the Olympics:
an Olympic techno-dance by 6 year old French who sings in English, French and Chinese.
It’s on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyLC_i9xDG0
and it is packed with images of Olympic Beijing by night:
from excited youth on Tiananmen Square to exotic street snacks (care for a scorpion BBQ?)