Excuse me while I blow-off some steam. A lot of people have been complaining about NBC's coverage, but I think many of them have missed the point.
The tape delay didn't bother me at all. UK is like 8 hours ahead of the west US coast, and I work all day. I CAN'T watch it live. So, what are people complaining about? I'm happy to wait till the evening to watch.
Also, I think it's understandable they'd focus the most of sports where the US is featured... every country does that.
So, what ticked me off? A list is below the orange doily.
In no particular order:
1) a few weeks before the Olympics started, NBC said we could "watch events free, streaming..." but didn't mention (at least didn't make it clear beforehand) that you needed a cable subscription to see most of the content. I don't have cable, and am not going to sign-up for a crazy cable contract to watch 2 weeks of Olympics. I would have happily paid ~$10-20 to get access to all the sports via an iPad app, or streaming. CBS did a great job of this with the NCAA basketball tournament... pay a few bucks for the app, and you get everything.
2) The few events I could see via the app were not compatible with apple's air-play, meaning I couldn't easily push them up to my TV screen. Instead they used some proprietary Adobe software.
3) The titles of the event clips online SAY WHO WON!!! WTF? I get home from work and want to see some clips of the day's events, but all over nbcolympics.com the news of every event is spoiled right in the title of the clip. I can't even go looking around for something without seeing "Hungary defeats Iceland in handball match". I wanted to watch that you dickheads - thanks for ruining countless events. So, I stopped going there, and couldn't even watch the few clips that were indeed free to watch without a cable subscription.
4) Primetime coverage was from 8-12 every night on the west coast. I know that's primetime technically starts at 8pm here, but that's so stupid. I work all day and get tired around 10-11. Can they please start at 6pm? screw the local news... who the hell cares about that?
5) Too much time spent not showing actual competition. The worst of this was Brokaw's exercise in ego, foisting his greatest generation spiel on us once again... nice story, but has NOTHING to do with the Olympics. An HOUR was wasted on this needless history lesson - history I'm already well familiar with. Other big time wasters were a nearly hour long interview with Michael Phelps where he said nothing new, a thing on the Dream Team of 1992, and too much footage from the London tourism office.
6) Enough with the beach volleyball. I don't mind watching it a little, but 20 minutes is enough. Just show the last set.
7) Not showing "everything else". Each night of primetime should have stared with a COMPLETE wrapup of the days events.... it would give a great sense of how "big" the Olympics are. I mean, 5 minutes each of badminton, archeryjudo, wrestling, soccer, fencing, equestrian, rowing, handball, water polo, etc... then spend more time on the "big" events of track & field, swimming, gymnastics, etc. I'd like to at least see a little of these other events and just get a sense of what's going on.
8) Decathlon got shafted. I realize there wasn't a lot of drama with the score, but this was a big deal, and we barely saw it.
9) Everything else got shafted (see 7 above).
10) Right now, the marathon is happening, but what's on my local NBC station? paid-advertising, and then cartoons for 2 hours. Are you frikkin' kidding me? Apparently they're showing the marathon on some other channel. Are you telling me the local station is making more money selling time-life music and with cartoons?
The actual Olympics were great, the coverage of many of the events that I did see (i.e. the filming, and announcing) were good as well. The editorial & business decisions by the management at NBC sucked foot fungus.
thanks for reading... Feels good to get that off my chest.