Remembering The Olympics Triplecast

Through the years, there have been many memorable failures in business. "New Coke", the Edsel, and the Sony Betamax immediately come to mind. Sports television is no stranger to failure, having seen NBC and ABC's short-lived joint venture "The Baseball Network", the XFL, and, one of the most well-remembered but costliest failures in history, the Olympics Triplecast, a pay-per-view system set up by NBC and cable operator Cablevision as a way to offset the enormous fee that NBC paid to cover the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics. It offered three channels, "red", "white", and "blue", each offering expanded coverage of not only the usual Olympic sports, but also coverage of sports that never usually got a lot of time on past Olympic broadcasts, such as basketball, soccer, volleyball and others.

The red channel offered swimming, track and field, and boxing, among others, while the white channel covered gymnastics, soccer, equestrian, tennis, and baseball, and the blue channel offered full coverage of the Dream Team's spectacular run to the gold medal in basketball, plus wrestling and other team sports. NBC personnel contributed to the coverage, such as Ahmad Rashad, Hannah Storm, Gayle Gardner, Don Criqui, future NBC swimming play-by-play man Dan Hicks, and longtime newswoman Kathleen Sullivan, all of whom were hosts for the coverage, which ran live for 12 hours each day across the three channels, with a replay following each broadcast. Unfortunately, due to the high cost that NBC offered for subscriptions to the broadcasts, it proved to be a commercial disaster, and only 165,000 subscribed, far below the 3 million that NBC and Cablevision predicted (USA Today, 8/10/1992).

In many ways, the Triplecast was a precursor to today's expanded coverage of the Olympics, particularly on cable. Given the sheer size of the event, and the amount of sports being covered, the Olympics definitely requires expanded coverage of all events, from team sports, to sports such as synchronized swimming, weightlifting, judo, taekwondo, and other sports that are on the fringe in terms of overall interest. In the winter, the sport of curling has proved to be a big hit among American viewers, all because of CNBC's exclusive cable coverage of curling. NBC, having lost millions as a result of the low amount of buys of its Triplecast coverage, did not supplement its coverage of the Atlanta Summer Olympics four years later, but given the incredible growth of, and fan reaction to, women's sports, and the incredible success of both the USA softball and soccer teams, which received little coverage on NBC, cable coverage for the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics proved to be a necessity, and has been a part of NBC's coverage ever since.

These days, especially given the fact that some people managed to tape various sports such as swimming, track and field, gymnastics and basketball from the Triplecast, I tend to think of it now not as a spectacular business failure, but as an eye-opening preview of what sports television, particularly as it pertained to big events such as the Olympics, could be. I was only 10 years old back then, and while I never watched much of those Games, or even subscribed to the Triplecast, today, things are much different. I've been a big sports fan since I was 13, when I really started to pay attention to sports, and I have DVDs of this coverage around, acquired from various traders online. The Triplecast coverage of sports such as gymnastics, basketball, soccer, and other sports from those Games, at least from the various fragments that do exist on home recordings, is incredible. To see an entire, uninterrupted broadcast of a Dream Team game from those Olympics, or to watch an entire gymnastics competition, raw, unedited, and unsanitized for television, as it unfolds, is a unique, incredible experience. While today's cable coverage comes close to capturing the feeling of the true atmosphere of the Olympics, for me, the Triplecast was on an entirely different level, and while the production values weren't as high as NBC's coverage, the excitement and emotion of those Games were captured perfectly in their coverage, and I'm sure that for those who did watch, it was an incredible experience.