Posted on: Thursday, June 28, 2001

Winter of discontent in Olympic TV viewing

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

This will be the Winter Olympics when the West Coast television viewers become honorary Hawai'i citizens for a fortnight.

Which is to say that from Seattle to San Diego they will get amply acquainted with one of the joys that we here have come to almost take for granted: delayed programming.

For when it comes to television sports there has long been Eastern time, Central Time, Mountain Time, Pacific Time and, in our case, Close-Your-Eyes Time.

Geography and the good folks at the local network affiliates have helped us acquire a unique niche in American television as a place where people studiously avoid finding out what is going on around them for fear they might hear a score or see a result that could ruin an evening's television.

Woe be to the person in any office here who lets slip the score on a game that will televised on a delayed basis. It comes with the territory in a land where Monday Night Football is actually Monday Afternoon Football on tape delay. And where you catch baseball's Japan Series live, but not America's World Series or weekday NBA Playoffs.

So, while NBC affiliates demanded the right to show the 2002 Winter Olympics on a three-hour tape delay on the West Coast and it gave network honchos apoplexy, it gave us the promise of having company come February. When the Games will, again, be delayed here, KHNL (Channel 8) said.

Never mind that the Winter Olympics are being held in this country, Salt Lake City, Utah, for the first time in 22 years. Forget that NBC took so much heat for the delays in its coverage the last time around that you could almost hear the screams from Sydney.

Or, that Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports insisted: "A domestic Olympics cries to be telecast live as all previous U.S. games have been. I am emphatic in my belief that this is a mistake."

Still, faced with the prospect of showing the games at what would be 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time, West Coast affiliates have chosen to do what their brethren here do: delay.

Delay because the audiences, even with a three-hour delay, figure to be larger than they would be in the afternoon, no slight consideration when it comes the February rating period or working around news programming.

It is the same scenario, said John Fink, president and general manager of KHNL, that has made Hawai'i the top domestic market for the past two Winter Olympiads and paid off handsomely for local affiliates. Fink said audiences on CBS, which held the rights for Nagano in 1998 and Lillehammer in 1994, earned audience shares of 28 and 37, respectively, or 107,000 and 137,000 households.

Come the 2002 Winter Olympics, the West Coast will add a new meaning to "Hawaiian time."