NBC Skimps on Online Olympics Coverage — Again
Don’t expect to watch the 2010 Winter Olympics live online — unless you like cross-country skiing. NBC Sports has released its coverage schedule for the Vancouver games, and once again, it has made the decision to keep marquee events from being shown live online. Despite touting more than 835 hours of live video from the Winter Games, less than half of that will be actually be streamed live online.
As usual, the company is saving premiere events — figure skating and alpine skiing — for broadcast on NBC network, along with freestyle skiing, speed skating, snowboarding, and short track. Meanwhile, the various cable nets, including USA, CNBC and MSNBC, will have extensive live coverage of sports like ice hockey, the biathlon, and curling. But none of that will be live online; instead, the remaining 400 hours of live coverage on NBCOlympics.com will consist primarily of events like bobsledding, cross-country skiing, the luge and snowboarding.
The situation is similar to what happened during the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, when NBC touted more than 2,200 hours of live Olympic coverage on NBCOlympics.com and a total of 3,000 hours of on-demand video. In that case, the remaining 800 hours were events that were scheduled for live broadcast on NBC and the company’s cable networks. (Unfortunately, NBC didn’t take our suggestion to get rid of tape delays for online video.)
The big difference between the 2010 Winter Games and the 2008 Summer Games is that this year, NBC plans to tie online access to its coverage of the events to an authentication scheme that will determine whether or not users have a cable subscription. So live, streaming video at NBCOlympics.com will only be available to those that have paid for cable access.
So between the lack of live events online and the authentication scheme, you can expect that a number of users will seek alternative ways of finding Olympics video, just as they did in 2008.
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Absolute terrible idea, but NBC is full of them.
Brandon
Just South of North
http://justson.blogspot.com
I believe CTV.ca has promised to cover every event live on the web. Not sure if it will only be available to Canadians.
http://www.ctvolympics.ca/news-centre/newsid=26147.html#olympic+website+revolutionizes+games+coverage
BOYCOTT NBC’S Celebrity Apprentice!!!
http://56rebels.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/boycott-celebrity-apprentice/
The US may have the worst Olympics coverage of any modernized country. Not only are the events butchered for prime-time and biased towards certain countries (mostly the US), they purposely delay events so Bob the genius Costas can frame the narrative so that he looks like he knows something.
I don’t usualy call for Govt intervention in sports except for safety issues, but the Olympics should be required to be shown live, or don’t bother bidding for it. The coverage will probably stink again this year. Go to the Vancouver site:
http://www.vancouver2010.com/olympic-schedule-results/
…compare this with the NBC schedules and see how they match up.
You can’t figure out what NBC is showing or if it is live, and if it doesn’t say live, assume it’s canned.
NBC has the lamest and worst Olympic coverage. It has way too many commercials. But what’s worse are those stupid lame ass human interest stories of the athletes. Who cares! BORING.
They always seem to edit them against some sappy film score (like Forest Gump or Rudy) with soft dissolves.
Just show the damn sporting events and let the athletes actions speak for them. No wonder that network loses money.
Absolutly should be LIVE, in case they don’t know Vancouver shares same time zone with Pacific USA.
The United States is the DUMBEST country in the world, and the Olympic coverage is reason #2,873 why the U.S. sucks and why Americans are stupid. Whenever foreigners say they love America, I cringe.
yeah, we suck so bad – thats why we’re kicking everyones ass in the olympics.
NBC is lame bob c sucks and always has the worst coverage ever but typical for nbc i just refuse to watch anything on nbc. an refuse to watch anything that involes costas.
We lost money on the last Olympics, so let’s do the same thing this time. Idiots
Here we are Feb 2010…. NBC coverage still sucks… SLING BOx and HAVA Proxies or even ip proxies are badly needed so we can see what good coverage actually looks like in a country other than the US..
The only thing we wanted to see is downhill skiing….
They are not covering any downhill skiing events.
^%$$%^@#$%^ NBC
Yes, NBC has freaking blown the coverage again!!!. 8 minutes of the Downhill, BS Studio commentary, idiotic commentators. I just pray the Universal Sports will show all the events in the ENTIRETY when NBC is done. Once again, NBC shows why it should NEVER be allowed to broadcast the OLYMPICS. What we need is a station totaly devoted to Olympic LIVE no matter what the time the events are.