London Olympics 2012

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No even worse. NBC showed Olympics on NBC, NBC Sports, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, and if you were on Comcast, two dedicated Soccer and Basketball channels.

Yet they still chose to delay a ton of events for primetime and not show them live. As was made a really big deal of last Sunday, at 4pm eastern, they were showing some equestrian event when the 100m was being run live.

It's one thing on the weekdays when they think people are working, but on the weekend, pretty weird. If Sun afternoon is good enough for the NFL, which is pretty much the highest rated sport all the time, it should be good enough for NBC, who are generally 4th out of 4 networks in ratings lately. :p

Wow. Sucks to be you. BBC had coverage of every sport simultaneously, with or without commentary.

Also:

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Madness? Really? You want to commemorate British music, so you drag out a one hit wonder from 30 years ago?

They're not exactly a one hit wonder in this town.

Still, that closing ceremony was bloody shocking. I'm sure they did it to return Londoners to their default state of moaning cynicism in time for work today.

Katy wrote:

Oh, I know. It's really just the last wave of disgruntlement. I've been generally pretty happy with coverage, except for the prime time coverage. Most of my TV watching in the last few years has been with assistance of a TiVo, so I have less patience for ads than ever before..

My TiVo habit was why I didn't have a problem with NBC's coverage. I don't watch anything live so I can skip commercials.

Next Olympics (in Rio) will be closer in an American-friendly (read East Coast-friendly) timezone. So more stuff will be live around here at least. Theoretically.

And four more years of social media and internet life will change how its reported as well, I imagine.

tboon wrote:

Next Olympics (in Rio) will be closer in an American-friendly (read East Coast-friendly) timezone. So more stuff will be live around here at least. Theoretically.

Vancouver Olympics were in the same time zone as me. Still delayed 3 hours....

By then NBC might set up a website where you can stream any event for a fee. If they follow the trend of some game developers, you'll pay $5 to get all the volleyball matches for the U.S. team streamed live. (I mean, all matches except the gold medal round if they reach it. That will be available only as downloadable content for 300 extra NBC points).

goman wrote:
tboon wrote:

Next Olympics (in Rio) will be closer in an American-friendly (read East Coast-friendly) timezone. So more stuff will be live around here at least. Theoretically.

Vancouver Olympics were in the same time zone as me. Still delayed 3 hours....

This. Obviously NBC does not care about the West Coast.

Funkenpants wrote:

By then NBC might set up a website where you can stream any event for a fee.

They have that. The fee is called "cable subscription".

NBC FAQ[/url]]Q: What is required for access to view “Live Streaming” video content?
A: With a cable, satellite or telco TV subscription that includes MSNBC and CNBC, you can access live streams of EVERY Olympic event at no additional charge.

Katy wrote:
Funkenpants wrote:

By then NBC might set up a website where you can stream any event for a fee.

They have that. The fee is called "cable subscription".

Did people not want to use that for live coverage? I didn't hear much about it during the past two weeks.

I did for a few things, like the volleyball matches. But it was tough for things like the 100m or any of the swimming races. You needed to catch it for exactly the 1-2 min that the race was on.

And then unlike every other sport, they refused to link a video replay of any event that they were going to show later for primetime. So if you missed it live, you were out of luck.

Seriously, I was complaining about this stuff for the last 10 days, were you guys not reading the thread? Or the recap that Blind_Evil gave us on the last page?

Funkenpants wrote:

Did people not want to use that for live coverage? I didn't hear much about it during the past two weeks.

We watched quite a bit during the day, but it's during work so not proper watching. The computer (YouTube) streaming froze up a lot on me. The iPhone/iPad streaming was almost perfect.

Funkenpants wrote:
Katy wrote:
Funkenpants wrote:

By then NBC might set up a website where you can stream any event for a fee.

They have that. The fee is called "cable subscription".

Did people not want to use that for live coverage? I didn't hear much about it during the past two weeks.

Part of the problem was, as Stele says, how they archived and indexed the coverage for specific races. So say you wanted to watch all the coverage of women's 100m hurdles. You could go to the video section and scroll through all 600 videos for track and field, trying to find the specific event you were looking for. Or you could go to a completely different spot and get excited to see a "full replay" link next to "Womens' Hepathalon - 100m hurdles", only to click on the link to find a five-hour video described as "Main-feed coverage of the morning session, including qualifying flights of the men's discus and women's shot put and first round heats of the women's 100m hurdles, women's 1500m and men's 800m." with no further indexing.

Neither of those is particularly useful if you want to watch all the heats for one particular event, and no other events, without wasting huge amounts of time manually trying to find what you want, especially if you're looking for an event that lasts 15 seconds in a 5 hour video.

I thought it worked like you log in at specific times to watch the races live. Indexing and organizing footage by event is a separate process, but it seems like it would be easy for them to do.

Stele wrote:

I did for a few things, like the volleyball matches. But it was tough for things like the 100m or any of the swimming races. You needed to catch it for exactly the 1-2 min that the race was on.

And then unlike every other sport, they refused to link a video replay of any event that they were going to show later for primetime. So if you missed it live, you were out of luck.

Seriously, I was complaining about this stuff for the last 10 days, were you guys not reading the thread? Or the recap that Blind_Evil gave us on the last page? ;)

I was waiting for the replay in Prime Time with the monkey from the Animal Hospital crap show they have been promoting

I've got to say we were fortunate for coverage. With satellite we had 3 full time, live channels, one highlights channel and one dedicated to the soccer. I especially liked the dedicated soccer one, meant it was easily avoided.

Funkenpants wrote:
Katy wrote:
Funkenpants wrote:

By then NBC might set up a website where you can stream any event for a fee.

They have that. The fee is called "cable subscription".

Did people not want to use that for live coverage? I didn't hear much about it during the past two weeks.

This was how I watched the Olympics as I have a cable subscription but no TV (bundling is some weird voodoo math where it's cheaper to have cable w/ internet)

They didn't show full event replays for the "prime" events that they would tape delay air later. Also most of the full event replays would have a blurb at the bottom "Watch X beat Y in [sporting event]" It really took a lot of the pleasure away from watching. I was at the point where I would cover part of the screen with my hand and switching to full screen before I could see the blurb.

The stream/playback was...ok. It did freeze a lot especially when switching to commercials. They had a picture in picture type of format where you could preview one sport in a smaller screen then switch it to the main screen. Once the stream went to a commercial your controls were disabled and you had to sit through them. This was ok...but I had it once where my picture in picture screen went to commercial and forced my main screen (the event I was actually watching) to go to a type of "we'll be right back" in a pinnacle moment in the event. This made me rage pretty hard.

I'm glad that they did offer this service, but dear god I hope they learned something and will work on a better interface in the future.

I have to say I was blown away by the BBC coverage of the whole thing. On Satellite (Sky) there were 24 (yes, 24) Olympic HD channels, pretty much every single stage of every single event was on live.
Add to that one 3D channel (Admittedly some of it rubbish, but some pretty good), all events live on the website with instant replay, mobile coverage etc. and it's one of the best coverages of any event I've ever seen.

All the footage, summaries, documentaries etc they had running up to the opening & closing ceremonies and throughout were some of the best ever in my opinion.

The whole thing was just brilliant and hearing all the controversy with NBC just makes me appreciate it even more.

I was really happy w/ the BBC online coverage. I used unblock-us.com's VPN to access it from the states. It allowed me to watch what I wanted to live. This was pretty much just the track and field events, but I could watch the heats and semi-finals of the 1500 in full, instead of just the few minutes NBC devoted to the final. I also liked Michael Johnson and the BBC announcers much better.

I was also fortunate enough to make the trip over to London for some of the action. (My partner and I took a few days in Edinburgh, a few in Ireland, and ended w/ a week in London at the beginning of the games.) We only had tickets to one event: Women's volleyball: Italy v. Japan and UK v. Algeria, but it was a great night. We also watched some events on the public Jumbotrons in Hyde Park. This was pretty cool, despite the limited access. (Not so much for security, but rather to ensure the sponsors' monopolies on concessions.) We had to line up to get in w/ advanced reservations and submit to bag checks. Once inside, we had 6 giant screens to watch live events on. The day we went we got to see Zoe Smith break the UK record in her womens' weightlifting weight class and the 10m mens platform pairs, where the popular UK team dove well, but botched one dive to put them out of contention. The crowd was spirited and it was nice to be part of the event.

The BBC coverage was brilliant and they have really set the standard for future events. They had almost 6000 hours of live coverage in total I believe. As people have already said, not only did we get what was on BBC 1 (from pretty much 7 in the morning to Midnight, baring breaks for the news), BBC 3 was also showing live sport all day. We also had the red button which allowed us to watch any sport going on at that moment and access to the BBC coverage online.
Also thank god for the American channels exclusive contracts that keep Michael Johnson from working state side, instead we get him and he is by far and away the best expert on track and field I have seen.
When I was down there, I had less idea about what was going on than when I was at home because I didn't have access to the BBC (I was camping). When I started to hear stories of the U.S coverage, I was in shock, I mean seriously not showing things live so you can hold them back for primetime is a disgrace, when it comes to sport, it has to be live for me.

I hijacked my parent's DTV login to get my olympic fix. NBC screwed it up in ways I couldn't imagine before I saw it first hand. So man ads 'Watch free online, your ipad, yadda!' yet all of them required a cable/satellite sub. Ad fail, if you ask me.

Gripes aside, what I saw I loved. Watching Ashton Eaton and Trey Hardee dominate the Decathalon was incredible, such phenomenal athletes they are. Same goes for the last ~20 minutes of the Men's Marathon; Stephen Kiprotich's fantastic overtake of the two Kenyans was simply jaw dropping.

Yeah, Kiprotich's sprint overtake was on a blind corner for the main TV coverage angle, so when he appeared first and sprinting away (sprinting - after about 22 miles !), the commentators were most surprised and were basically cheering him on, but it was so well timed that he broke the back of the Kenyans then and there.

From what I saw, nothing at the games compared to the men's 800 meters. David Rudisha smashed his world record running from the front and he pulled along two under-20 years old stars to silver and bronze and then two Americans to the #2 & #3 all time US marks. Every position, including the UK runner in DFL set an olympic record for time at that place. It was amazing.

Yeah, there were some really great track and field highlights. The men's 4x100 where the Americans matched the old world record and got silver? (the Jamaicans breaking into 36 seconds was jaw dropping amazing!)

sh*tty coverage and analysts but the analysts at least got much better at the end.

The American 68k(?) wrestler was blink-and-you-missed it good.

Spain really challenged the USA in the men's gold medal basketball game. It wasn't really decided until the last 2 minutes or so. (I think the US was still fighting to keep a 3 possession game with under a minute to go.)

I loved the woman's marathon swim. Who would have thunk it would be an exhilarating finish with .4 seconds between gold and silver?

The US women winning a grudge match against Japan for the soccer gold medal on last minute heroics.

There was a brit middle distance runner that led the pack a long ways and you could see the effect the roaring hometown crowd had on him as they lifted him to gold. The "I did it!" look on his face as he crossed the finish was priceless. I am such a softy. I am tearing up as I type this. (manly tears of manliness of course.)

Are we keeping this thread around for the Paraolympics? Because Team GB were set their target today of 103 medals, one more than they got last time around. We might not be a sporting superpower in the Olympics but good god we are awesome at the ParaOlympics, must be all the sitting down

fangblackbone wrote:

There was a brit middle distance runner that led the pack a long ways and you could see the effect the roaring hometown crowd had on him as they lifted him to gold. The "I did it!" look on his face as he crossed the finish was priceless. I am such a softy. I am tearing up as I type this. (manly tears of manliness of course.)

That's Mo Farah. He's kind of a big deal (here, at least)

Dear The USA. You missed the hell out not watching the Paralympics. They were awesome.

http://london2012.blogs.nytimes.com/...

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