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Saturday, August 6, 2016

Olympics tape delay is a relic of the past

While Canadians watched the Olympic opening ceremonies live on TV and swapped reactions on Twitter, Americans seethed as they waited for NBC’s notorious tape delay.

Commentary, pictures, even the occasional video were all there under the hashtag #OpeningCeremony — making it all the more obvious to U.S. viewers that they were being left behind.

Americans living near the border could turn to CBC, but most were left to grind their teeth or voice expletives.

NBC’s bizarre explanation was some gibberish about women and reality shows. I’ve read this missive three times and still find it baffling.

More women watch the Games than men, and for the women, they’re less interested in the result and more interested in the journey. It’s sort of like the ultimate reality show and mini-series wrapped into one.

The statement has been called patronizing and straight out of the ’70s.

I’m pretty sure the whole thing comes down to executives thinking the network would get better ratings this way. They know they’re pissing some viewers off, but they figure those people are a vocal minority.

There may be some truth to that, but criticisms over tape delays go back at least six years for both winter and summer Olympics.

People pay plenty for cable TV in an age where it’s more and more tempting to cut the cord and go with streaming services like Netflix.

What stops many people is the idea of losing live (as opposed to tape-delayed) news and sports. The norm these days is instant gratification. And an increasing number of people are becoming tech-savvy enough to find ways of getting around artificial limitations.

NBC ignores this at its peril.

The NHL of the future (Part 2)

A map of the NHL with Winnipeg in it is fine, but what we really want is an NHL with franchises in Hamilton and Quebec City. What would that look like? Here’s what I came up with:

The main thing to note is a northwest division with four out of five teams in Canada and a northeast division with all five in Canada. This might be the closest thing we ever get to an all-Canadian major hockey league.

In this scenario, the teams with the worst attendance records — the New York Islanders and the Phoenix Coyotes — finally give up the ghost and head north. The latest attendance figures show both those teams well below the minimum average of 13,000 per game that commissioner Gary Bettman set for Winnipeg. The Islanders were at 11,059 and the Coyotes at 12,188. I expect things to get even worse in Phoenix as fans realize the team is on its last legs.

If all goes well, maybe the Columbus Blue Jackets — scraping by with 13,658 a game — will move to Regina once the Potash Centre (an arena that exists only in my imagination) is built. That would round out an all-Canadian northwest with Minnesota shoring up the central division. Atlanta, by the way, got bumped with 13,469 a game, so Columbus better be looking over its shoulder.

My version of the new NHL

I’m not much of a sports fan. About the only time I get interested is when a Canadian team has a shot at the Stanley Cup or when Canada’s men’s hockey team is playing for a gold medal.

Or if the NHL moves a team to Canada.

This combines nicely with my love of geography, because with Atlanta moving to Winnipeg the league will have to be realigned. There’s no way you can have a team in western Canada playing in the NHL’s southeast division with the likes of Florida and Carolina.

So listen up, NHL, and take a look at the Google Map I created with teams moved around so that each is in its logical division, using geography as the main criterion.

Winnipeg would be placed in the northwest division along with Calgary, Edmonton, Colorado and Minnesota. Vancouver — a city on the Pacific Ocean — would be bumped into the Pacific division. This in turn would allow Dallas, which is nowhere near the Pacific, to move to the central division to be with more natural rivals — Nashville, St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit.

The tricky part is keeping a balance between eastern and western conferences. After all, if Winnipeg is added to the west, then a team currently in the west must move to the east.

Even trickier, is the fact that the two easternmost teams in the west are Detroit and Columbus — and they’re virtually on the same longitude. As it turns out, Columbus is slightly more eastern. This is a good thing, because I’m sure Detroit fans would rather stay with old-time rival Chicago.

And so with Columbus we finally find a team to replace Atlanta in the southeast. Technically, Philadelphia is a titch further south than Columbus, but it seems a shame to break up the current pairing with their Pennsylvania rival in Pittsburgh.

So there you have it. No need to thank me, Gary Bettman. It’s all in a day’s work here at newsonaut.