Water-Cooler Effect: Internet Can Be TV’s Friend
Remember when the Internet was supposed to kill off television? That hasn’t been the case lately, judging by the record television ratings for big-ticket events. The Vancouver Olympics are shaping up to be the most-watched foreign Winter Games since 1994. This year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched program in United States history, beating out the final episode of “M*A*S*H” in 1983. Awards shows like the Grammys are attracting their biggest audiences in years.
Many television executives are crediting the Internet, in part, for the revival.
Blogs and social Web sites like Facebook and Twitter enable an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to split their time between the computer screen and the big-screen TV.
“The Internet is our friend, not our enemy,” said Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, which broadcast both the Super Bowl and the Grammy Awards this year. “People want to be attached to each other.”
Seeking to capitalize on the online water-cooler effect, NBC showed the Golden Globes live on both coasts for the first time this year, and the network reportedly wants to do the same for the Emmy Awards this fall, so the entire country can watch (and chat online) simultaneously.
But sometimes the effect works even when the program is not live. Rachel Velonza, a 23-year-old from Seattle, knew that Johnny Weir failed to win a medal in figure skating long before she ever turned on a television last Thursday, but she stayed up until almost midnight, enduring NBC’s much-ridiculed tape delay because she wanted to see for herself why he wound up in sixth place. She knew all her friends were watching because they were talking about it on Twitter (which says it counts 50 million posts every day) and Facebook (which says it surpassed 400 million members this month).
“People want to have something to share,” Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC Universal, said from Vancouver. He said the effects of online conversations were “important for all big event programming, and also, honestly, for all of television going forward.”
If viewers cannot be in the same room, the next best thing is a chat room or something like it.
That’s what MTV found last fall during the Video Music Awards: the Twitterati were in a tizzy when Kanye West snatched a microphone from Taylor Swift in the middle of her acceptance speech. The show had an average of nine million viewers, its best performance in six years.
The Recording Academy, which presents the Grammys, mounted a digital campaign to promote the awards show this year, signing up Facebook fans and monitoring Grammy-related Twitter messages.
There are other factors contributing to the ratings spikes: attention-grabbing shows (the Super Bowl featured the New Orleans Saints, a popular underdog), gradual population growth and an economic contraction that some analysts say is leading to more people spending more time at home in front of their TV and computer screens.
Along with those reasons, “increased usage of social media is definitely driving the ratings,” said Jon Gibs, a vice president at Nielsen. He said the Olympic data showing simultaneous TV-and-Web viewing signaled the growing importance of interactivity to the television experience.
Some of the marquee Olympic events are tape-delayed this month, even though Olympic results are instantly available on the Web. But people are still watching the Games in prime time.
Brad Peterson, a lighting designer in New York, heard about the skier Lindsey Vonn’s crash before Thursday’s replay of it on NBC, but watched regardless. After all, he said, “I didn’t know when, how and who won.”
For Mr. Wurtzel, the Olympics are a lab, and so far he said he has found that people who follow the Olympics both on TV and online wind up being heavier viewers of television.
Media companies are starting to consider how to incorporate that water-cooler effect — and how to harness it for day-to-day TV shows, too. For the Olympics, NBC is promoting something called “You Be the Judge,” which lets viewers submit their own scores for figure skaters through a Web application and compare their scores to other viewers. The network’s Web site also features a gadget that tracks Twitter opinions about the Games.
词句笔记：
big-ticket event: 大型活动
credit：把……归于
Many television executives are crediting the Internet, in part, for the revival.
许多电视台行政人员都把电视热回归的部分原因归于网络。
water-cooler conversation：办公室饮水机旁的闲谈
capitalize on：利用，从中获利
spike：长钉，长而尖的东西
rating spikes：收视率增长
