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NBC: How (not) to simulcast commentary
A fond memory of mine were Saturday nights when my dad and brothers would watch a movie on network television with the sound turned down all the way. Actually it was just the sound on the television that was turned down, our home stereo was cranked up high enough to bother my mother in the other room. This was — at least for my family — our first taste of ‘home theater’ in that the local network affiliate was simulcasting the stereo sound via an FM station for the movie on television. It was great fun for us folks back in the day before stereo audio with your television signal. Fast forward to today.
Tonight… er, well, last night the second episode of Scrubs (one of my laugh-out-loud shows) began with a teaser saying that you could log onto nbc.com during the show to listen to the director’s (Zach Braff) running commentary. How neat! I’m one of those people that enjoy listening to the commentaries on the DVDs we own so it piqued my interest. What a let down, then, when I get to the site (mind you the episode has already started) and my options are to download the entire commentary or its four parts. The ineloquence is this: I had to try and sync up the commentary myself with the running program which may have been possible had the commentary track had bits and pieces of the episode audio in it, but it didn’t and I couldn’t. Adding insult was that the process for enjoying the commentary meant that I had to pause and restart at exactly the right times to ‘edit’ out the commercials because no filler had been added for them in the file. Needless to say, this process wasn’t easy enough for me to just sit back and enjoy so I ended up not listening to it at all, even though I was interested.
Let me take a second here to applaud NBC. I think this is a neat idea. Of course with the coming digital standards for television it will be quite easy to just add an additional audio track directly to shows so this idea has little chance of becoming mainstream. But even for the short time here where it remains a relevant option, wouldn’t it be better to stream the audio — loop it every hour to catch the different time zones — so as to avoid the complicated mater in which this first attempt was made? While podcasts are the rage, is it really necessary or advantageous for me to add this file to iTunes? Without the video is there even a context for keeping the commentary archived? The answer is no.
So please NBC and whoever else may be thinking of doing something similar: set this up as a timed stream that compensates for your network commercial breaks. Heck, pump in the audio from your commercial customers; I don’t care! If you’re going to do this, do it right. It really isn’t that hard. Work with your Internet network provider to multicast the data at the router and it will likely decrease your total bandwidth requirement and increase your level of service. And isn’t that what it’s really all about?
PS. I know the podcast and show are mainly about Zack’s character and a picture of him would likely fit better here. I just think Donald’s Turk is funnier most of the time.
written by Kevin in web stuff