Also, coverage on the BBC and CBC is so much better. It’s not watered down for Americans. Fewer sappy human interest stories, less flag waving, less figure skating and ice dancing, and more hockey, curling, and biathlon, am I right?
I know the Games haven’t even started yet, but I wanted to be proactive about my rant.
And how they (are gonna’) cut away from the closing ceremonies to show some crappy new show that they promoted relentlessly during the coverage. (Which will be cancelled shortly thereafter.)
And from what I understand, new episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D are being delayed until after the Olympics, so NBC’s suckiness is even bleeding over to other networks. Bastards!
That seems more like public service.
NBC’s Olympic coverage always sucks. I feel sorry for those people in the US who aren’t close enough to Canada to watch the Olympic on the Canadian networks. Much, much better coverage, less fluff.
Isn’t NBC airing the gold medal men’s ice hockey game live? What more could you want? (Meanwhile, the night before the closing ceremony seems to be highlighted by the figure skating “exhibition gala,” which is supposed to be limited to medalists, but I wouldn’t be surprised if NBC, er, “persuades” the organizers to include more Americans who didn’t medal.)
This just in; Shaun White says he won’t be competing in snowboard slopestyle because he wants to be sure he can be at his best for halfpipe. NBC is probably working on a Shaun White human interest story to air in place of the event as a result.
From looking at NBC’s televised schedule, it looks like that’s exactly what they will be doing again - “part one” of the closing ceremony is listed as ending at 10:30, and “part two” starting at 11:30.
Don’t forget spending an hour on a story that has little, if anything, to do with the Olympics just before the closing ceremony begins; that’s another NBC “tradition.”
I work as a media buyer and regardless of how shoddy NBC’s coverage is, people watch it. A lot of people watch it. So many people watch it that it pretty much dominates every time period it’s in, and when doing our media buys we have to account for the ratings it will pull away from the other networks (many of which will just run repeats against it).
Your rant is a very good one, sir.
In my experience, though, the Canadian coverage is if anything even more homer-ish than the US coverage.
(But we don’t talk about that…)
Proactive rants are a good idea. I’m already ranting about the poor quality of candidates in the 2016 presidential election, the length of next season’s baseball games, and the shitty summer weather we’re going to have.
And how about the way they only show medal ceremonies that Americans are in?
This is a relatively recent thing, and it’s largely because Canada, since the 1988 debacle, has gotten really good at winning medals at the Winter Olympipcs.
Prior to that, let’s be honest, Canada was never good at the Olympics (actually we did okay really early on, but once things got televised we started falling behind.) Except for the medal glut of the boycotted 1984 Games, CBC had no choice but to show other countries winning stuff because there were not enough Canadian medal contenders to fill the airtime. Homerish still isn’t very pronounced during the Summer games, where Canada does not do as well, so CBC has little choice but to show some other stuff, whereas NBC could show nothing but American medal winners and still not have time for them all. At the 2012 Olympics, an American athlete or team won a medal about every two hours of competition.
After the horror of Calgary, they started putting a lot of money into winter sports to prevent that humiliation again (Calgary itself being a big part of that, since it provided training facilities aplenty) and the medal count started growing, so Canada is now a major player at Winter Games. Now it’s easy to spend a lot of their time on Canadian athletes. There are few times during a Winter Games when a Canadian athlete with a real medal chance isn’t competing.
People watch NBC only because they have a monopoly on coverage. The only other possible way to see the Olympics is to try figuring out proxy accounts or determining which illegal sites wont infect your computer with viruses and yet show a half decent feed.
If alternate Olympic feed was available from a wandering monkey with a camcorder strapped to his head I would gladly watch that instead.
And to continue the theme of NBC suckiness, have you seen the new NBC News website? It’s completely unusable.
I finally managed to TO their schedule on the website, and for some of the hockey games, they’re only being broadcast once, live – and they’re at like, 3 am. WTF? Dammit. You know, some of us would like to watch, you know the OLYMPICS, not just the USA IN THE OLYMPICS. Grrrr :mad:
Every time the Olympics arrive there is constant complaints about the coverage. They do have a focus group: that focus group prefers events where Americans win, and likes the up-close-and-personal bits about the athletes. So the rest of us are, as we have always been, just plain out of luck. But they do know their market.
Well, the CBC would show curling, wouldn’t they?
I’m sure you’re right. My baseline recollection of Canadian TV homerism, though, predates Calgary and comes from the Summer Olympics. You might recall the much-hyped race involving Mary Decker of the US and Zola Budd of South Africa, I mean Great Britain. There were evidently some other runners in the final, too, but no one cared about THEM, not even the Canadian announcers–
until Budd and Decker had a kerfuffle, Decker dropped out of the race, Budd fell way back, and OMIGOD A CANADIAN RUNNER IS GOING TO FINISH SECOND! OMIGOD! OMIGOD WHAT A RACE SHE RAN! SHE HAS JUST WON A SILVER MEDAL FOR CANADA! WHAT A MOMENT! THIS IS INCREDIBLE!
and on and on like that for I-kid-you-not five minutes without once mentioning the name or nationality of the, you know, winner of the race.
Never seen anything quite like that either before or since.
Had to look it up -The Canadian came third and the winner was from Romania.
And Decker tripped herself.
Just watch the BBC. Not only are there NO ad breaks at all, we’re also really shit at winter sports so the focus certainly won’t be on home grown talent.