I spent much of February watching dozens hours of figure skating coverage NBC's networks broadcast from the Sochi Olympics. I'm a die-hard skating fan, so this was the culmination of a whole season's worth of figure skating events I'd been following. Starting in the fall, I'd been eagerly setting my DVR for the early competitions that serve as tune-ups for the Olympics.
But it turns out those early events aren't just chances for the skaters to perfect their programs. As I watched these events, I slowly started to realize: Hey, NBC is beta-testing its broadcast!
For one thing, NBC and its sister networks were trying out different commentators in different combinations (it's where Sochi's star duo of Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski first started calling performances, though not necessarily together). But NBC was also playing around with what to show on the screen during a performance.
Here's one example: During the Olympics, NBC would show a clock on the screen at the halfway mark of a figure skating performance, indicating that the skater would get a bonus for any jump completed from then on. The "bonus clock" showed up at some of the earlier events, too.
But a number of other events had this instead:
Source
In the upper left-hand corner of the screen, there was a running tally of the technical scores each skater was receiving. It was updating "live-ish" — since humans still do the scoring, there was a bit of a delay — and it would often show the total a few seconds after the skater was done.
I always found the tally distracting — mostly because it was so specific but also too late to tell me how much a particular thing I'd just seen was worth. It wasn't actually giving me information I wanted to know in real-time, and because of that, I would have rather waited till the final scores were revealed at the end of a performance rather than get annoyed by a widget that was trying to tell me something and failing.
Lo and behold, when the Olympics broadcast showed up, there was no score tally! So I suppose someone somewhere agreed and decided to go in a different direction.
This made me wonder: How many other sports did NBC "beta-broadcast" before the Olympics? For some sports, like hockey, NBC already has a standard way of filming and commentating. But what about the fringier sports that most of us only see every four years, like ski jumping or luge? How many iterations did NBC try before deciding that the bobsled clock should turn green when a team was ahead of the current leader and go back to white when they fell behind? How long did it take to figure out when to show the average miles per hour on the screen during long-track speed skating races?
In browsing through videos as I wrote this, I found a ton of videos from Universal Sports, one of NBC's networks, of World Cups and other pre-Olympic races in a whole bunch of sports. I bet if I flipped through them, I'd find plenty of rejected ideas that NBC decided weren't ready for prime time. I'd love to be inside that decision-making process and understand how NBC chose which features to keep on screen. Did they use research? Technical feasibility? Aesthetic preferences? Or something else entirely?