I Hate NBC

We tolerate this sort of behavior because the Olympics are broadcast “plausibly live” — I believe the term was introduced in ’92, or thereabouts. If we made a big stink and NBC started announcing things like, “We’re going to show the tape of the Olympic Synchronized Shuffleboard competition at 4:30 pm Saturday,” it would ruin the illusion.

Of course, the reasonable solution is for the all of the Olympic games to begin at 7:00 PM EST and end at midnight EST, and then they could be broadcast live. But the Olympic organizers, apparently, hate America.

I hate the IOC. The ‘territorial’ model for broadcasting, divvying up rights within explicit national borders, looked dubious in 2000; in 2004, in the era of broadband and Bittorrent it looks ridiculous.

It means that even the BBC has had to strip out lots of Olympic coverage from its website. As in, photographs and copy. Athletes with personal sites and weblogs are forced to stop posting updates, under pain of expulsion, because a few ‘holiday snaps’ of the Olympic village are Just. Not. Allowed.

How the hell do the world’s big broadcasters end up as the IOC’s bitches? And how can the IOC continue to play on the whole ‘world coming together’ thing for the Olympics, when its balkanising media policies simply do not allow any sense of how other countries see the games?

I believe “plausibly live” became the catchphrase when the games were in Seoul.

The plausibility was rather in doubt, given that several tapes of outdoor events were of midday or late afternoon games broadcast around 8:30pm EDT. The light was plausible neither for the current (dark or darkening) US environment nor an early morning sun =setting= as the games progressed.

Plausibly live has little or nothing to do with it. If they said we’ll start showing swimming at 10:03, you wouldn’t watch from 8:00-10:03. It’s simple bundling.

I also think the level of exclusivity has changed, very much for the worse. I remember an earlier cable era when swimming and gymnastics would be shown on NBC, but I could turn to TNT or ESPN and watch Graeco-Roman wrestling. Lots of it. I think that has changed.

Thanks,mac I will go searching around. Course this was the week Comcast decided to completely rearrange all my digital channels, all 300 of them, most with new numbers for the first time in 25 years…

The thing that is so sickening about NBC is the way they expect to be given a pat on the head for their dreadful efforts. If ABC had a brain they would realize that there is nothing stopping them hosting an olympics show since at the end of the day NBC shows less than 4 minutes and 32 seconds of actual event coverage in a three hour show. The rest of the time is taken up by airhead interviewers talking to other airhead interviewers about what they think is going to happen in the events that the audience is not going to be allowed to watch.

Get Jon Stewart out there to host it, he is already one of the three most credible political interviewers in the US (the others, no joke at all being David Letterman and Jay Leno). So why not also become the best sports reporter?

Back when I still cared how Hungarians did at the Olympics, I used to get really frustrated about having to watch coverage in the US. The only sports the network would cover were the ones in which US athletes had good chances of winning the gold. These sports did not overlap with the strength of Hungarian athletes so I didn’t get to see much. In contrast, when I used to watch in Hungary, the network would try to cover all sorts of sports irrespective of how Hungarians would do in them.

It sounds like things have gotten even more annoying. I’m glad I don’t follow this stuff much anymore.

So true. My neighbor is in the women’s single sculls. With six channels you’d think I’d be able to watch. But no, they started live coverage 30 minutes after her event. Just to repeat (and I’m guessing here) Hardball with CHRIS MATTHEWS. I should just stop typing now before I degenerate into a stream of profanity.

Brian, I don’t know if you were here four years ago when the Olympics actually were in Sydney. For an Australian, watching the Opening Ceremony was particularly annoying, with ten minutes of coverage, then a cut away to ads, or Katie Couric interviewing an American athlete about how exciting it was, or a story about Katie seeing some kangaroos at the zoo that morning. (And of course then all the usual frustrations of actually trying to see Australians participating in the sports themselves).

TV coverage here in the U.S. is a disgrace. Snippets of competition here and there cut up by commercials and mushy, vapid, useless, fanciful profiles of select athletes. So by the time they finally cut to an actual event (which barely lasts a few minutes, just in time for another commercial) you’re left drowsy by so much insipidness and brutal commercialism and don’t have any information about the competition you are about to (briefly) watch. I grew up in France where we had only 3 crappy channels whose mission was to employ as many socialist-voting, gauloise-smoking fonctionaires as possible but at least we had hours of live, ininterrupted, mind-blowing coverage of the games – I want my state-controlled media back!

caught an Aussie in the men’s single scull heats late last night. CNBC seems to have decent coverage — just sports and not too many commercials.

India gets it right, for once. Here we can watch 24/7 throughout the games. And they show a good variety of events. Indian commentators are just slightly less inane than the Americans, though. But at least they are not on all the gd time.

Thank god for tivo…

My dual tuner tivo with its 100 gig of space makes watching the olympics bearable.

Its only Saturday morning, first real day of the games and I have already skipped at least an hour of mind numbing commercials and at least 30 minutes of up close and personal… and 2 hours of rowing (i just saw the end… or backed up if the races were close.) as well as two hours of Womens Soccer.

But I got to see the womens 10 meter air rifle, the first medal given at the games… it was facinating and fun. 4 women were within 1 point of the gold and the russian lady flubbed her last shot to give the Chinese woman the gold.

I watched the last 20 minutes of an amazing volleyball game between the underdog germans and the chinese and the first couple of innings of the US playing Soft Pitch baseball with the world best (and prettiest) pitcher. fast forwarded after she struck out 4 sides and we scored four runs.

I also got to see Mark Phelps first race in the games. And when my girl friend came back from some errands, she got to see it too. If he wins 8 golds I will be really happy I caught that this morning.

So instead of complaining about the poor programming, take control of it yourself! YOU be the one that programs what you watch! Tivo can cost less than $100 and it changes everything about watching TV.

Tivo is my second favorite piece of electronics ever! right after my Mac….

Plausibly live has little or nothing to do with it. If they said we’ll start showing swimming at 10:03, you wouldn’t watch from 8:00-10:03. It’s simple bundling.

Of course, that’s right.

Of course, I don’t know a single person who’s planning to watch the Olympics for a significant amount of time, once they realized there was no way to know when what they wanted to watch would be shown.

Maybe eventually the ratings will go down, if nobody watches it for a few decades.

well the canadian opening ceremony did have those extremely annoying interviews with cell phones. sounded a lot like when someone puts their mouth directly on a micropone.

early on when there are lots of qualifiers and it’s impossible to show them all, so obviously respective countries will show their matches before they show anything else.

and as someone else said, cnbc didn’t actually show the rifle when it said it would, at least on the channel they said it would be on unless there’s some sort of local programming choice. (the pvr recorded cnbc world)

watching gymnastics on nbc: “tonight, the reigning world silver medalists” me: uh, silver?

Justin, the coverage may be on six networks, but very few of them are doing anything live, or at predictable times. Notice how they have to put it in big print when anything is LIVE on their schedules – on any of the six channels. But maybe it will get better as we go through.

Agree completely with Brian–NBC is worthless. Yesterday afternoon, I had a friend call from Paris, asking if I was watching the opening ceremonies. Of course not–it’s only the rest of the world that is watching that event live, without commercial interruptions. I would see it hours later, packed with commercials and overrun with innane commentary (including a ridiculous number of references to 9/11).

Hoping the coverage today would be better, I have been wildly disappointed. This evening, all the day’s events have been boiled down to cloying, personal profiles. Meanwhile, everyone with a computer, learned the results much earlier in the day.

Anyone who has seen a real network (say the BBC) cover the Olympics, knows that NBC is a catastrophe.

I watched the opening ceremonies last night on NBC — it was the most vapid coverage possible. Bob Costas and Katie Couric were jingoistic, callous, ignorant, parochial yahoos.

Agreed, Sean. It was infuriating. They stopped the parade of nations every five minutes for a string of commercials, then played catch up, showing us who came in while they were away. God forbid they don’t show commercials, or only do at, say, half hour intervals. By the end of it, I wanted to strangle Cattie Curic with Bob Costas’s entrails.

Being an Olympics fan, I am glad I live in Europe. In Holland you get fulltime coverage of most events, with a special focus on those in which the Dutch participate. In Belgium the national VRT launched an extra tv-station just to cover all the sports this summer, including the Games. Here in France I got to watch the whole opening ceremony. It is sad that the coverage in the USA, one of the major contenders, is so poor. But I guess the attitude of the NBA players with regards to the national basketball team says it all.

I watched the mens cycling road race yesterday – sort of – I actually saw 3 minutes or so of action every other lap or so.

What I thought was laughable was that we heard absolutely nothing about the guy who won the silver medal in that event, because no one in the booth knew who he was, he was just some dude from Portugal as far as they were concerned.

I used to love to watch the Olympics when I was a kid, but between the end of the amateur athlete and the piss poor coverage, I’m one unhappy viewer.

Time was (pre-1976) the US had the best Olympics coverage in the world. ABC was just flat-out outstanding. I forget the name of their host, but he was terrific.

But, ABC sucked in their ratings so they decided to spice things up. Aaron Spelling. Howard Cosell. In 1976 time that used to be dedicated to actual sports was elimintated in favor of “Up Close and Personal” features of U.S. athletes. Tape delay was used extensively, which made no sense with the games being in Montreal. They borrowed from “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” (generally an excellent program) the technique of splitting an event into parts, and showing each part a little at a time as though it was live.

Alas, the ratings soared. Probably due not to the style of the broadcast but due to general increase in interest in sports in the US plus the fact that it was on the same continent. But, network execs took note.

In 1980 NBC pledged that they would show more of the Olympics live and get away from the “Up Close and Personal” stuff … but Carter boycotted them so it became a moot point.

Then came 1984, The Capitalist Olympics. With the eastern bloc boycotting the US won almost everything. Huge ratings, and focus was on all US, all the time. Events were either scheduled for prime time(Gymanistics and Mary Lou Retton) or tape delayed (Greg Louganis). Everything was told from the US point of view, even Mary Decker’s stupidity. Non-US stories were very hard to find. The cast was set. All Olympics have followed the formula ever since.

Here’s what works for me.

1. Go to http://www.nbcolympics.com.
2. Click “TV LISTINGS” in the black menu bar.
3. Click the link that says “For a complete schedule of a sport during the Games, click here.” I won’t link it here because I think the front page has to set a cookie in your browser for to work.
4. Leave the word search blank.
5. Select “swimming” as the sport.
6. Select the widest possible date range.
7. Submit.

This gets me a long list of scheduled swimming events. Some of them are on HDTV, but a lot are on NBC. (A search for dressage indicated that these listings also include Bravo where applicable.)