The Triplecast

In my last post, I mentioned the Olympics Triplecast, an experiment in pay-per-view programming attempted by NBC and Cablevision for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games. Not a lot of people remember this venture today, where pay-per-view sports, movies and events have become commonplace, but back in the early 1990’s when I was working in cable, pay-per-view was really cutting-edge stuff (even though the equipment we were using to provide it wasn’t) and the Triplecast was the most ambitious project attempted to that point in this new medium. That it failed utterly, and more to the point, WHY it failed utterly, make it worth remembering.

The mechanics of the program seemed simple enough. NBC and Cablevision were offering three channels (the Red, White and Blue channels) of Olympics coverage, live and uncut, over what we would today refer to as cable pay-per-view. There were three levels of coverage available, called the Bronze, Silver and Gold packages in a modest bit of subliminal advertising (the Gold Medal is for the winners of each event, so if you bought the Gold Package, you were a winner, too. If you bought the Silver or Bronze packages you were still World Class, but not the Gold Medalist…). The Bronze sold for $95 on most cable systems, while the Silver was about $130 and the Gold was $170. In theory, if you purchased the Gold package and had three VCR units and a lot of tape, you could have watched every minute of every Olympic event. With the other two packages you would still get more coverage than anyone could possible watch in three weeks or even three months.

The failure of the experiment is usually blamed on the price. NBC was still broadcasting a lot of Olympics coverage over their broadcast channels for free, and while they cut around to different heats on different events, you could still see most of the more popular Olympic sports without having to pay for them. Some observers have also blamed the failure of the Triplecast on the unfamiliarity of pay-per-view services, customer distrust of the network to provide content worth paying for on the pay channels, or even nationalism (Americans will only tune in to watch American athletes, it was said, and all of those will already be shown on broadcast television). The truth, however, is that the project was doomed from before its inception, when the consumer surveys were still being tabulated.

It turns out that several senior executives at NBC and its parent company (I’m not going to name names; I’m not the litigious type) had become rather enamored of the Triplecast, and felt that their personal prestige would be threatened if the project was scrubbed. So when the surveys came back indicating that not enough consumers would “definitely purchase” the Triplecast, one of the network executives ordered that all of the “might purchase” and “uncertain” responses be counted as “definitely” results. The project was green lighted, the contracts were signed, a huge amount of money was spent, and the packages were offered to the consumers.

Of course, when the time came, all of the “maybe” results turned into “No” results, just as any who has ever studied consumer behavior or statistics could have predicted. It didn’t help that the consumer surveys had not specified a price, or that the price finally offered was considered exorbitant (in 1992, on the cable system I was helping to run, $170 plus tax would have paid your basic cable bill for SIX MONTHS), but the simple fact is that there had never been a sufficiently large market for this product – and the people who should have realized that were blinded by their own arrogance and pride.

It has been estimated that the parties involved lost something on the order of $100 million on the Triplecast – not a lot of money by current standards, perhaps, when we have grown accustomed to the idea of a single movie losing more than that, but back in 1992 that was considered a lot of money, even in the television industry. On our cable system (of perhaps 5,000 customers) only one (yes, 1!) person ordered the Gold package, and perhaps a dozen others ordered silver or bronze. This ratio (a “buy rate” of considerably less than ½ a percent) was recorded all across America. In the long run, pay-per-view has matured into a very profitable business, and most of the early “bugs” in both the technical and business aspects of the product have been ironed out. But there’s still no fix for either arrogance or pride, let alone stupidity…