Will Vancouver 2010 be the year we put TV to bed?
My husband and I debated intensely over the period of several weeks prior to the Olympics, whether of not we should get a TV. I was dead against it and he only wanted it for a two week period. I reminded him that as a Brit, he might be annoyed by the “Canadian” focused coverage and thus won the argument.
Personally I was a bit blazé about this whole Olympic event. But once it got started, I found myself caught in the whirlwind of excitement. Walking through the city, the buzz just took control of me and I became an immediate fan. We invited ourselves to a few friends place and went to a pubs to watch the events on their TVs, but we couldn’t justified doing this everyday.
To my delight and more importantly my husbands’, we discovered that we could watch most events on the Internet. CTV streamed all of the events including the medal ceremonies. Using my dual monitor set up, I was also able to follow most of the events at work.
As Mhairi wrote a few weeks ago in a post discussing Social Media and the Olympics, this year was also the first “Twitter” Olympics. Using a series of hashtags such as #van2010 and #olympics following the events became quite fun. I was also able to get and share info about the different houses and free venues using Twitter. For example on day 2 of the Olympics, I found out that the queue for the zip line was already 2 hours long an hour before being opened and posted the info on Twitter. A follower thanked me and made different plans for the day. How great is that?
Prior to giving up TV I also stopped my subscription to the newspaper. The only time I ever looked at the sport section was during the Olympics, but now I no longer had that option. Flickr of course came to the rescue. Following the appropriate tags led me to discover fantastic photographers and photography blogs.
I’m not sure that Vancouver 2010 would have been as much fun without the Internet and I didn’t miss having a TV one bit.
You didn’t miss much w/o TV. Though we have one (OK, 3) I’m not inclined to put up with all the commercials just to watch the network’s coverage back and forth among events.
Turns out, every time the TV was on, we saw the same clips repeatedly. I swear, Lindsay Vonn crashed into the fence 6 or 7 times. Nevermind other events–just Vonn’s biff over and over again.
And I will admit, when I was tired or bored watching an event, I’d check out Twitter. Being in the same timezone as Vancouver, seemed silly to have to ‘wait’ for the results!
We are all consumers of information and thanks to social media, we now have choices as to how we can to get our information. Its no longer all about traditional media companies pushing out information in the format they want us to see. The focus has shifted from the information provider to the recipient.
Nice post Christine – thanks for the mention!
It will be interesting to see how TV networks react to this new trend. I hope that they emulate CTV’s approach and provide as much video content on their website and youtube.
Catherine, your comment about the US coverage is quite common. A friend of mine was in Japan at the same time and they showed a lot of figure skating! That’s pretty much all they showed.
Thank you both for your comments.