I hate NBC
Today, Lindsey Vonn won the women’s downhill. Gold medal for Vonn, with her teammate Julie Mancuso taking silver. It was thrilling, or at least I think it was. I wasn’t able to watch it. You know why? Because NBC didn’t want me to watch it. Not live, anyway. One of the most exciting events in this year’s Games, and NBC didn’t want anybody to see it live. No, they just want us to watch the highlight reel tonight in prime time.
It’s fucking incredible. I went all over the NBC Olympics website trying to figure out where I could see the downhill live. Nada. NBC has something like a half-dozen various cable channels for its Olympics coverage — regular NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, etc. — and not one of them was showing the women’s downhill. Not one.
You couldn’t even watch it live online. I have Silverlight, I can watch the NBC coverage on my computer. And you know what they chose for the live video feed today? Housework on Ice, otherwise known as curling. Can you imagine? No offense against the housework people with the little brooms, but jesus fucking christ. I’d rather watch the downhill.
The only live coverage of the women’s downhill was — get this — the live blog. Yes. Live blogging. Six cable channels, a live video feed, and we have to follow the women’s downhill by blog.
Feel the excitement:
I imagine this is what it was like in olden times, before satellite, before television, even before radio. It’s like following the Olympics by telegraph.
31 Responses to “I hate NBC”
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cellocat says:
See, women just aren’t that interesting. Our victories are boring, our failures are dull, and our feelings are just irritating. Men’s muscles, on the other hand, are endlessly fascinating. And their sweat, ooh, it’s such a turn-on!
/snarkFebruary 17th, 2010 at 5:16 pm EST -
riverdaughter says:
I feel your pain. I looked in vain for an Olympic Events package on my satellite providers website. I was willing to pay hundreds of dollars to see what I wanted without the schlocky “Up Close and Personal” crap. I don’t like the feeling that I’m being marketed to. For one thing, I’m always the outlier in my socio-economic and demographic group. For another, the personal segments just grate on the one nerve I have left.
Unlike you, I actually like curling but the commentator they have this year is tough to take. I blame it on her. But yeah, I would have liked to see more snowboard cross, skiing and speed skating IN REAL TIME! Or at least let me set the DVR in real time so I can watch it at my leisure on my time schedule and where I can fast forward through the commercials I’ve already seen a zillion times.
Now,there’s a concept: NBC should never show the same commercial twice or not within a certain time frame.
Come to think of it, why can’t we get feed from the Canadian broadcasters? Doesn’t the fact that we can only see NBC coverage mean that they’re censoring input from other sources? Someone get Al Franken on the phone because this is the kind of stuff he might be worried about with the Comcast merger. I mean, did the American people make a deal with NBC to have the Olympics censored? -
votermom says:
It is censorship. If we let the public see all these women competing they might get strange ideas of emancipation.
Another thing that bugs me is the USA-centric focus. It’s super annoying for anyone who might be interested in other countries’ teams also, like immigrants, tourists, etc -
madaha says:
I also felt NBC’s promotion before the Olympics was strangely woman-free. I didn’t see ONE commercial for women’s figure skating, which I thought was one of the primary draws for the winter Os! I felt that they were distinctly trying to macho-up the place. weird.
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Violet Socks says:
cellocat, they did the exact same thing with the men’s downhill. No live coverage, just tape-delay later that night in prime time. They’re doing this with all the sports, not just women’s.
riverdaughter, I like curling fine, though it completely baffles me. But on the day of the women’s downhill, I would have preferred that they use their live video feed for that rather than for the broom people.
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tpfka nycblue says:
Oh rats! Just got home from work and I didn’t know she won. You need a spoiler alert!
I hate the NBC coverage as well, Olympics coverage in general is always bad.
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Cyn says:
Violet, MSM is the scourge of the nation. Don’t watch it never, ever, ever. It will suck out your brain and poke knitting needles in your eyeballs.
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Riverdaughter says:
Violet, I totally agree that you should have been able to see Vonn’s race in real time. But why should you have to make a choice? My DVR is a dual recorder. I can record on two channels while I’m watching a third. My point is that you should be able to buy special events packaging and it just isn’t offered.
I have no idea why NBC wants to do it this way. It’s not like we won’t know who won if they wait until prime time. It seems to me that you ought to be able to pay fir the privilege of seeing it live and let the frugal wait until prime time. But in our present case, you get no choice. Everyone is forced to wait unless they are actually on the slope watching. It is a complete mystery to me why thus should be the case when live Internet streaming and real time coverage is certainly well within the realm of the possible and trivial. Why NBC would
pass up a money opportunity like that is beyond me. It’s a counterintuitive arrangement with the IOC that just frustrates viewers unneccessarily and makes them give up and turn on HBO. -
Reader says:
I know the anger is righteous and legit, but you still made me laugh and I thank you for that.
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Lori says:
I remember years ago, I think it was the Korean Olympics. I had it on one night and the unfortunate Bryant Gumbel was yammering on about the events of the next day and he described some men’s dashing event as THE event of the Olympics that EVERYONE was waiting to see.
Uh, no, Bryant. I’ve seen guys run fast before. Not even remotely interesting.
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cellocat says:
Violet, ok. Rant taken back.
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Adrienne in CA says:
Why NBC would pass up a money opportunity like that is beyond me.
Don’t they just want to force us to watch the commercials in prime time? Yes, they could attach periodic commercials to live streaming, but my understanding is that online ads don’t yet command the big advertising bucks. Nor would prime time advertisers be willing to pay primo prices for their slots unless they know it’s the only place viewers can go to watch. It’s best for everyone to force the greatest number of eyes to the same place at the same time.
As for a special live-view package (presumably commercial-free), either they don’t think they have enough viewer interest to make it worth their while, or the TV advertisers would again complain about loss of eyeballs, or the Corporate Networks/IOC just want to manage content. Sounds to me like a lot if not all of the commentary is edited after the fact but before prime time to make it smoother and avoid any embarassing misspeak. Heaven forbid some camera should catch a sign protesting the lack of women’s ski jumping.
That’s my guess, anyway.
I DVR the late-night replay and watch it at my leisure, fast forwarding through the commercial crap and anything else I can’t stomach. But that’s not an accessible solution for most of America.
Something like C-Span for the Olympics might be nice. Either that or boycott the Giant Flaming Dick-capades.
*****A
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caroline says:
The video for Vonn’s run is finally up on the NBC site:
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Nessum says:
So maybe you don’t even know they have re-named the games Vonncouver? :)
What I’m watching here in Europe is what the Canadian Broadcast offers and the coverage is absolutely fantastic !
Any and all of the events are shown amazingly well! Cameras covering everything; from afar, up close, slow motion of important incidents, instant repeats (and blessingly quick cut-aways when the audience start waving to themselves on the big screens!). Interviews with “our own” athletes are done by our respective national broadcasters.
And yes, they also showed k.d. lang up close in her mesmerizing opening performance!
I agree that following the Olympics in the US is very frustrating as the focus is almost entirely on American athletes. But is it really only immigrants and tourists in the US that care about other countries’ teams? :)
Ok, we have to stay up late here to watch in real time, but there are reruns all through the next day. And no commercial breaks. And knowledgeable commentators who for the most part speak only to tell you something you didn’t know/want to know/like to know!
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Nessum says:
Let me add that I also enjoy watching performances that aren’t cut into 2 second music-video-style segments, as most other performances seem to be these days!
And no unsteady “hand-held” cameras, ahhh!
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Gayle says:
what do you need video for anyway?
That live blog is positively scintillating!!
I heard the Winter Olympics is a big money loser. That’s probably why they spent most of last night on Shawn White.
People actually watch the X Game stuff.
They always pre-record the more popular events for Prime Time viewing. Why they can’t play it live on one of their other networks (MSNBC?)and then play it again at night is valid question. Maybe they’re worried about spoiling the Prime time coverage? It’s not like people who want to know who won can’t find out in real time now.
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Darragh Murphy says:
Violet, no kidding! I had never seen curling before until yesterday while carting a couple of nine year olds around to the bowling alley (yay Feb Vacation Week!) I was sucked in to the tv’s above the lanes. What IS that thing they are doing with sticks and strange globular objects??
Anyway, I caught this video of the amazing Vonn this morning. You may need to install the viewer, but it’s totally worth it to see the video.
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Darragh Murphy says:
oops! link!
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riverdaughter says:
Dear Nessum.
:-pppp
Believe it or not, there are Americans who don’t give a rat’s ass about the Team USA member who is going to finish 15th but who has a compelling human interest story. There are plenty of us who would kill to see real live sports coverage of all of the athletes who compete.
There are also plenty of us who wouldn’t mind watching the CBC version.
And as for the mountains of commercials, I buy Tide because I like clean clothes, not because I am a woman or a mom. I’m unlikely to ever buy an Audi and a Tucson is SUV territory and as a hostage in suburbia, I don’t want to go there.
I would have paid for a satellite package deal. If Dish offered me Olympic coverage via the CBC, I would have been there in a heartbeat. If NBC had offered me a package similar to that, I would have paid a premium for it.
What NBC wants is control. They want to run the Olympics as if it was still 1975 and there are only 3 networks on TV. “You will be assimilated, Resistance is useless” This is not engendering love or brand loyalty towards NBC. The coverage is crap, we’ve all known it for years, which is why many of us have avoided it. Wanna know how much I watched of the Beijing Olympics? Nada. Zilch. I barely watched anything from Nagano. This year, now that I have a nice 46″ LCD TV in my brandy new finished basement, I thought I’d watch Vancouver. But I might as well be back in 1975 as well with the quality of the drivel NBC is sending out. In fact, back in the 70′s, we watched Wide World of Sports that was only slightly America centric. It had human interest stories as well but we were also allowed to watch every fricking skiier in the downhill races. Even if it wasn’t the Olympics.
Go figure.
Well, this isn’t the only boneheaded decision that NBC has made recently. And when you consider how nicely the CBC is covering things (we’ll have to take your word for it) we can only conclude that the problem *is* NBC. Someone at the network is making a lot of money for showing the Olympics in dial-up mode in a gigabit ether world. Don’t blame it on Americans. From what I read on the internet, we hate it. -
Emily Post says:
“I also felt NBC’s promotion before the Olympics was strangely woman-free. I didn’t see ONE commercial for women’s figure skating, which I thought was one of the primary draws for the winter Os! I felt that they were distinctly trying to macho-up the place. weird.”
That’s LADIES’ figure skating, as the Olympic event is still called, believe it or not. The reason NBC is not spotlighting it this year is because there are no American stars in contention for a medal. The best overall American female skater, Rachael Flatt, is national champion but not yet an international one and these Olympics are unlikely to make her so unless all the top Asian girls fall on their butts. When it appeared that Sasha Cohen might make the Olympic team, NBC played her story up hard in news items and Olympic previews. Then she crashed and burned at nationals and NBC focused more on Vonn, who received at least as much pre-Olympics media attention as Shaun White.
Vonn was awesome yesterday. I know nothing of skiing but I know utter fearlessness when I see it. Wow.
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DarthVelma says:
madaha,
They aren’t talking about women’s figure skating on NBC because the US doesn’t have a real medal contender among the women this year.
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ghost2 says:
Many events are available at CTV.ca or http://www.ctvolympics.ca/ (see right hand side, viewer’s guide, again I have a direct link at: http://www.ctvolympics.ca/tv-o.....index.html .)
I hope you can access the streaming from USA.
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slythwolf says:
All the confusion we feel about why networks don’t seem to care about the interests of the viewer melts away when we remember that the audience is not the consumer, but the product.
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jackyt says:
http://www.ctvolympics.ca/alpi.....index.html
That’s the CTV site. It looks like they had it live at half after noon. But you can still see it on their site if you have silverlite (or whatever). You might want to follow the CTV schedule as it looks like you’ll see things there you might not see on NBC.
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Northwest rain says:
NBC’s coverage has been consistently sucky — nasty — awful.
The last time I bothered to even watch NBC Olympics was when I could get the Canadian feed (living near the Canadian boarder and on a hill helps). ABC was superior in coverage. Being on the west coast when the Winter Olympics were in Asia was the deal breaker (TV out the window time). The west coast never got live feed — the east coast saw the program FIRST and then nearly 24 hours later the west coast got to see the crap feed with so much fluff and B.S. — that it was a waste of time.
So I just boycott the whole mess. NBC sucks.
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Northwest rain says:
I just googled — Canadian live feed of Olympics
There are a number of places that seem to offer live coverage of events skipped by NBC.
Canadian coverage of the Olympics is superior to the US coverage.
But my boycott of NBC remains firm.
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Northwest rain says:
Try this link:
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madaha says:
@20 & 21
that bothers me too – the main reason I hate the Olympics, frankly, that it’s so goddamn nationalistic. So if an American isn’t going to win a guaranteed gold, then why bother watching? unbelievable.
I think figure skating is fun to watch, I don’t give a crap who wins. Also, isn’t it SUPPOSED to be about the world coming together and to honor the athletes of other countries? guess not!
That was the main complaint that my friends from other countries had – that American coverage was so ridiculous – rarely showing competitors from other places.
**shaking head** we are cheap and shallow, and don’t even have enough shame to TRY to pretend we aren’t!
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Violet Socks says:
There are a number of places that seem to offer live coverage of events skipped by NBC.
Yes, but we can’t see them down here in the lower 48. At least I can’t. The video feed is blocked if you have an American IP address, as I understand it. I think the only exception would be if you’re in one of the northern border states that includes CTV as part of your local cable package, in which case they would know that from your Silverlight settings.
It’s evil.
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Hate NBC Olympics coverage? Blame merger mania. « The Confluence says:
[...] Violet Socks is not the only person PO’d with NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. (There are plenty of complaints here and here.) Violet can’t see coverage in real time and she apparently works from home. I can’t see it at all at work, not even with my dual recording DVR because there’s nothing to record in real time that I want to see. NBC is even time delaying their broadcasts to the west coast. That’s right, if you live in Seattle, you can’t see what’s going on in Vancouver, just up the road a spell, until 8PM when NBC, who has exclusive broadcasting rights in the USA, will turn to its marketing department to determine what you want. If you are an American, NBC will presume that you don’t give a rat’s ass about the rest of the world’s athletes. You will get highlights of events where Americans are expected to medal (or is that podium? ). Interspersed with your carefully selected and edited sports niblets will be a ^&*(load of commercials and some nauseating human interest stories of determination and perserverence triumphing over heartbreaking personal loss and devastating injury. (yeah, right, Lindsey Vonn’s shin injury was catastrophic. Tell it to the podium) [...]
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Why I love the Winter Olympics | Reclusive Leftist says:
[...] if NBC will just let me see it. Share [...]
