soupsoup:

While NBC was airing “Ice Dancing,” their sister network MSNBC was airing one of the most exciting hockey games in recent history. It didn’t take a genius to figure the matching of the home host Canadian team taking on a surging USA team would be a compelling matchup. NBC realized the error of their ways in the final moments of the match, cutting off the two-man bobsled, but they already missed a golden opportunity.

Throughout the game, twitter was flooded with viewers buzzing about the match, so much so that “NBC” and MSNBC were trending topics, mainly based around people calling out the network for not airing the event on their main network, along with “Ryan Miller,” the USA goalie and “Team USA.”

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the network who decked Conan O’Brien in favor of putting a well past his prime Jay Leno back in his old time slot would make such a colossal programming blunder. The network has enjoyed record ratings thus far, but the lack of live events have frustrated viewers. In the age of the internet, you would virtually need to shut off your digital life in order to prevent yourself from finding out the results of what NBC decides to air hours later, in prime time. Twitter becomes a spoiler landmine and many found out too late to turn off their New York Times breaking news email alerts.

Here NBC had an a chance to capture an audience that would follow this USA hockey team to the medal rounds, and all in real-time. Instead, it they committed a crime of poor programming, enough to throw them in same MSNBC Lockup that normally airs weekend evenings and preempted in favor of men’s hockey.

Thank you, Anthony, for giving this a larger voice amongst the Tumblr crowd than it probably would have gotten. Though this wasn’t a Miracle on Ice sort of game, this was a special night in hockey. And it is a shame that NBC wasn’t covering it. I hope their executives can’t sleep for a week realizing the blunder they made by airing ice dancing and skiing highlights that everyone with an internet connection already knew the results of.