The Olympic-sized Consumer Behavioral Shift We Should Talk About

  Rassegna Stampa, Social
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Every Olympic season is a chance to get obsessed with some sport you just learned about, cry over an athlete from a place you didn’t know about winning gold, and generally get worked up at a perfect Simone Biles floor routine. It wasn’t long ago (circa 2010s) when the Olympics meant catching the games at odd hours or watching replays during primetime. While I certainly did my part this year to binge all things Team USA, I couldn’t help but notice the difference in experiences this year.

Conversations between friends and coworkers watching different things at different times shifted from “Are you seeing this?” to “Oh, you have to go watch it, I’ll send a TikTok.” What were once key moments of a shared collective experience, have splintered.

Welcome to the era of solo streaming. As an introvert, I’m fine with this (just kidding). Let’s break down this Olympic-sized behavioral shift and what it means.

RIP to the collective experience of live TV

When people watch sports together, they report a higher rate of fulfillment. It turns out that cheering together helps create a shared identity within a community. The Olympics is the pinnacle of this, a rare time when an entire nation can tap into this kind of shared experience. Then came new viewing options that irrevocably altered behaviors.

This year, Peacock became the definitive hub for complete Olympic coverage, a significant evolution since its attempt at a start when launching in time for the postponed 2021 Olympics. Every event is now available at our convenience in replay and as-it-happens. Watch what you want, when you want. The flexibility is undoubtedly convenient—while coming at the cost of fracturing the sense of collective experience into isolated moments.

Social media crumbs

Adding to this fragmentation are our favorite platforms like TikTok and Instagram. They flood our feeds with the highlights almost instantly, often before events are even aired traditionally or across non-Peacock services. Because of these platforms’ distaste for chronological order, we’d encounter clips out of order, disrupting a sense of real-time, joint viewing, and they often spoiled the results.

Shrinking the gap between event time and online conversation

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