The Breakfast Meeting: Sticking the Mars Landing, and TV\'s Latino Woes

By NOAM COHEN

While incredible feats were being accomplished in London, another example of human excellence was occurring millions of miles away: the Curiosity rover landed in a 96-mile-wide crater on Mars at 1:32 a.m. Eastern time. The Mars mission's final stage was a thriller - the rover, the size of a small car, was lowered at the end of 25-foot-long cables from a hovering rocket stage, Kenneth Chang writes. One wit on Twitter noted that the 14-minute time delay for images from Mars to reach Earth was nothing compared to the hours of delay from NBC in showing Usain Bolt's Olympic-record-setting dash in the 100-meter race.

• The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which operates the Curiosity rover, is close enough to Los Angeles that many celebrities made the trip, Space.com reported, including the actor Morgan Freeman; the host of “Jeopardy,” Alex Trebek; and June Lockhart of “Lost in Space.”

The la rge TV audience for the Olympics has been a pleasant surprise for NBC; so much so, that the network's executives say there is a chance the event will actually turn a small profit, Bill Carter writes. Ratings have improved from the Beijing Olympics four years earlier and Thursday night's program reached 36.8 million viewers.

• The beleaguered “Today” show has seen its ratings balloon because of its Olympics coverage, though it is unclear if that increase will persist when the show competes with “Good Morning America” on equal footing, Mr. Carter writes.

• The BBC, which has the advantage of reporting events in its own time zone, has covered the Olympics in a way that gives maximum control to the viewer, Eric Pfanner reports. With their remote controls, viewers can choose among as many as 24 live feeds of various events: “We wanted to give people every venue, from first thing in the morning to last thing at night,” said Roger Mosey, director of BBC's Olympics coverage. Of course, the BBC gets most of its funding from the public, Mr. Pfanner notes; NBC, which paid nearly $1.2 billion for the rights to show the Games, gets most of its revenue from advertising.

English-language TV executives recognize reaching the growing Latino audience in the United States is vital to their success, but thus far they have made few gains catering to it, particularly in scripted shows, Tanzina Vega and Bill Carter write. Top shows like “Modern Family” or “Two and a Half Men” will typically draw half the Hispanic audience you would expect, while Spanish-language television is proving much more popular. They write:

The issue, many viewers and critics argue, is that there still hasn't been the Hispanic equivalent of “The Cosby Show,” meaning a show that deals with Latino culture in a way that doesn't offend viewers with crude stereotypes.

With streaming radio any station ca n be listened to anywhere - such potential, but such cacophony, Ben Sisario writes. Into this world come aggregators like TuneIn, a start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., and IHeartRadio, owned by the broadcasting giant Clear Channel Communications, which can direct users to stations based on location or music style. It is still a confusing landscape, he writes, as broadcasters fret over the rising costs of online royalties; the plans of the companies behind the apps; and how to stick out at the aggregation sites.

• Lucky magazine is hoping to aggregate its readers' shopping experience on its own site, to be called myLucky.com, Christine Haughney writes. When it directs shoppers to store sites to buy items it suggests, a shopper never has to leave the Lucky site and can keep items from multiple stores in a shopping cart.