NBC continues to suck
Once again NBC covers the Olympic games, and once again their coverage of the games falls to new depths of suckage. Coverage focuses on the American competitors to the exclusion of everyone else, and there is a constant barrage of badly converted measurements to try and obfuscate that ‘confusing’ metric system. This conversion is not as appallingly bad as in the Summer Olympics, where track and field events never even tell you the actual measurements and instead convert ever jump and throw to feet and inches, but is still bad. A example from Saturday’s tape-delayed (Yes, the US is apparently the only country in the world where live sporting events are delayed many hours so that the coverage of the ‘premier’ events—skating and those where the US might win medals—happen in Prime Time) pairs ice skating. When the Russian couple completed their short program NBC cut immediately to commercial. Despite promising to return with their scores when NBC returned from the break all we were told was that the Russian team was in second place. Nice, eh? NBC’s tape-delaying means that the entire Internet is basically completely off-limits unless you want to know the results 6 or 8 or maybe even 10 hours in advance. If the IOC had a spine, they would insist that all coverage be live. The only bright spot is that curling is not a premier event, so I usually get to watch that live. Expect the tape-delays in 2008 (Beijing) to occasionally exceed 24 hours.