By David Bauder, Television Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --About half of the people who are using mobile phones to pull down video or information about the Olympics have been trying out that technology for the first time, NBC said on Wednesday.
NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co., has been using the Olympics as something of a research lab to track the adoption of new media technology. Since the opening ceremony last Friday, the company has made content available online, through video on demand and via cell phones along with traditional TV.
The number of people requesting Olympic content over their phones is still relatively small – 494,506 on Sunday and 476,062 on Monday – but NBC executives say they’re stunned at how many of those never used the phones for this purpose before.
“To some extent, the Olympics are beginning to influence how people use new technology,” said Alan Wurtzel, research president for NBC Universal.
By far, however, television is still the prefer red format. Of the estimated 107 million people to experience at least a few minutes of the Olympics on Sunday, 95 percent watched it on TV, NBC said.
Given the choice between a high-definition TV placed before a couch or a small, grainy picture on a computer screen, it’s still a pretty obvious call, Wurtzel said.
NBC’s prime-time ratings are running well ahead of the Athens games in 2004. Through five days, the average prime-time viewership for NBC is 31.3 million, the network said. Interest in Athens started slowly but heated up with gymnastics, while the Beijing games have been a draw from the start.
It has become a communal event that the country has enjoyed sharing, Wurtzel said, a rarity in the day of media fractionalization.
“I don’t think you’re going to see too much of this in the future,” he said.
Americans downloaded some 1.7 million video streams of Monday’s stunning swimming relay where the American team came from behind to beat Fra nce and keep Michael Phelps’ gold medal streak alive. An estimated 1.5 million video streams were e-mailed from one person to another, Wurtzel said.
NBC Universal worried in past Olympics years that its decision to air much of the events on cable outlets like CNBC, MSNBC and USA would siphon interest from prime-time, which is still where the network earns the bulk of its advertising revenue.
But the opposite proved to be true and, this year, the same thing has happened with the digital content, said Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More