Originally Posted by
drvannostren
Ok, totally sincere question here.
Why would they have an event for press, with a "sneak peek" at a new program, then have everyone contractually unable to talk about it? It seems like they won't be giving out all the details, which makes sense, but now we'll just end up with a bunch of blog posts that are barely fluff opinion pieces but lacking any detail to let people decide on their own.
Pretty much what Cow noted: it's generally to allow time for media to craft a more solid story, so that once the press release lands, there can be a number of decent yarns alongside it. Some media disapprove of embargos and NDAs, but I've always found them worthwhile – especially for something like this, which should give ample time to really dive into to the details, ask a lot of questions on matters which might not be obvious at first (and hopefully get decent answers to those).
Another good thing is that this can allow time for journalists to focus on their own key areas of interest: some media attending will really want to get into the 'business' side of things, others will be very points/status oriented.
What I expect will happen is that when we receive the NDA it'll come with the date and time that the embargo lifts. There's a caveat here: if somebody breaks the embargo, everyone is free to roll (there's actually another caveat, that if somebody reports
part of the info you're free to publish reporting to the same level but not beyond, however this one gets a little hairy in practice).