Wednesday night, the American Idol winner was announced. But the show ran long causing what had to be hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to miss the winner announcement due to their PVR failing to record past the scheduled time. My PVR, for example, recorded up to “The winner is… David….. Coo-”
I got the winner’s name, which was a delightful surprise by the way, but I missed the big emotional payoff immediately following. What did I miss? Tears? Freakouts? Screaming? Did little David get all Grand Theft Idol postal and take bigger, badder David out with a shiv? What? What did I miss?!?!?!?!
So I ran to the computer and went to the only place one can go at a time like this: YouTube. Already, dozens of clips had been uploaded from fans across America, bringing that exciting ending to me in crappy YouTube-shot-with-my-phonecorder quality. Despite the fact that the video quality was poor enough to make it difficult to tell David Cook from Randy Jackson, I got a sense of how it played out and was somewhat satisfied. (The video quality improved over time as people took more time to transfer the video from their Slingboxes and stuff)
So where was Fox? Asleep at the wheel again. I thought the wrist-slapping that the networks received at NAB this year was enough to teach them that timing is everything. Get your video up immediately after the event is over. If you’re a major TV network, your stuff should hit the online channels about fifteen seconds after the start of your on-air broadcast. If you have a live show that would be tricky, since the show hasn’t happened yet, so you have until about a minute after the show ends. Less if it’s a clip from earlier in the show.
Millions of people watched YouTube clips through the night and into the next day. Fox and Apple were nowhere. If kids can shoot, encode, and upload this stuff why can’t you?
Event Marketers – as you look to deliver your onsite event content online, which I hope you’re all doing now, consider the timing relevance of your content. Three or four weeks after the event is too long to be bringing archives online. The event has lost it’s mojo by then.
Since I also record Kitchen Nightmares, I saw the Idol Finale at the beginning of that show.