I’ve written a bit about the Olympics and have watched as much as possible of it. And even though I gave props to NBC’s HD Broadcasts I’ve felt that overall their quality has been just a step below terrible.
I was reading Slashdots commentary about the fact that NBC decided to do a live stream of the goldmedal Hockey match. It was DRMd so it couldn’t be saved or rewatched, and only viewable in Internet Explorer on Windows. Broadcasting companies in a number of other countries had been doing live telecasts on the internet since day 1 including multiple streams. For example: the BBC has had 4 different streams being shown live during the games. Add this to the fact one couldn’t watch just the events they wanted… and all of them on NBC. Instead you got short tidbits of random events. and a whole lot of Ice Skating (but not even all of that).
I long for the days in which on random Cable channels they’d do 24/7 Olympics coverage and the “popular” events would get shown prime time on broadcast. But for the most part there where a lot of live or at least full showings of events. So if you didn’t want to watch the full Cropss country, you changed to another channel that had some other sport. And people who wanted cross country could watch the full thing.
One example of a prime Broadcaster to take over for NBC was ABC, because they could show the prime broadcasts on ABC itself but they had all the ESPN and DISNEY cable channels to show the Olympics in it’s entirety. On one channel or another they could be broadcasting it.
Tags: Olympics, Television
