Olympic Open Source Lessons

The Beijing Olympics are almost half over and have had plenty of excitement ... gold medals, world records, and races decided by hundredths of a second. This makes my wife really mad! She doesn't hold a grudge against Michael Phelps, beach volleyball or the Chinese tandem diving team. NBC's coverage is what makes her blood boil. The open source world could teach NBC a valuable lesson.

NBC clearly withholds the most prestigious races and events for the late night hours. Anyone who goes to bed at a reasonable hour (meaning before 10:30 pm), like my wife, will miss much of the day's most exciting competition. I don't have that problem because I usually stay up a little later to check e-mails anyway, only to find myself drawn into the exciting events NBC saves for us night owls who don't go to bed until 11 pm or midnight. While I may be suffering from a lack of sleep, at least I have the satisfaction of seeing the best parts of the Olympics. Even so, I admit that it would be nice to reclaim an extra hour of sleep while still enjoying the best of the Olympics in primetime.

Not only is my wife becoming more frustrated each day as she hears news of the exiting events she missed the night before, but this is becoming a common theme for many who tune into the Olympics with the expectation of seeing something big. Why must we be subjected to hours of "competitive showering" in prime time only to see "nothing more than a bunch of highlight reels" late at night?

What would happen if a software company chose to tightly control the release of its most valuable features until it decided the time was right ... and it justified this action on the assumption that this is the way to maximize the extraction of commercial value from the software? Well, this describes the business model of the vast majority of the software industry and we know the result. Open source software has emerged to serve the needs of customers by giving them access to fully featured, customizable software for free.

We might as well refer to NBC as the Microsoft of broadcasting (maybe this explains MSNBC?). NBC has another option ... the open source option. Not only is it broadcasting the Olympics on television, but it also makes countless hours available through the Internet. As with television, NBC has chosen to tightly control its Internet content based on its television schedule. Research indicates that access to real time Olympic video would have little negative impact, if any. In fact, even NBC management recognizes that providing broader access to Olympic video through a variety of media would likely enhance the size of the audience as a whole.

NBC's approach to disseminating Olympic video illustrates that open source principles hold inherent benefits that transcend the software business. Opening up access to video through television and Internet would not only benefit NBC, its advertisers and its viewers alike, but it would also make my wife happy which is reason enough to do it (in my opinion).