Is Olympic television coverage outside of the US really _that_ much better?

Cafe Society
41

I don’t mind human interest stories. Getting some background on some of the athletes. NBC just used to get really carried away and way too glurge-y. It got to be very annoying. Nut the NBC coverages seems to have improved in this area. And having all those other channels that are more focused on the events themselves is fantastic.

Now, NBC is far from perfect. They’re about to turn me against Phelps (well, not really, but they are really overdoing it). And I hate that the “live” events aren’t really live here in California. And is synchronized diving really popular enough for promie time coverage? But overall, NBC is doing a reasonable job.

42

Horse floats, silly.

43

I’ve been watching on AlJeezera Sports and Dubai Sports. They show the main events but cut to events that are more popular in the Arab world or if an Arab is competing. Of course the comentary is in Arabic.

44

I’d actually say the Canadian coverage is worse in some ways. I do watch it, since it is another channel with coverage, but their coverage is weak.

Their experts…aren’t.

It is also a bit sad, watching them win zero medals and praising an athlete for finishing sixth.

However, I am now cheering for Keith Beavers in every event. :wink:

45

China’s coverage has been fantastic, especially in comparison to the US. CCTV, the national station, has 4 channels devoted exclusively to the Olympics, and they pretty much just broadcast event after event, with a few wrap-up and medal-count segments. And more importantly, virtually no special profiles about athletes’ lives and tragic upbringings; a few other non-event Olympic channels tend to cover that stuff, as well as life in the Olympic Village, blah blah blah. But since they’re on different channels than the events, it’s very easy to avoid.

It IS very Chinese-centric, however, and the announcers are extreme homers; they keep talking about “our Chinese team” and they start yelling like little kids when something good happens for them. Small price to pay, though, as I’ve never seen full matches of ping pong, badminton, fencing, judo, wrestling, etc. before during the Olympics. It’s probably the best taste of the events I’ve seen in my whole life.

46

What do you want, a fucking cookie? Go away.

47

Are you Jonathan Green?

48

NBC coverage this cycle has been the best that I can remember in the time since I started caring about this sort of things. It really helps that the stuff from 9pm on is live so they can’t screw around, and that I have about 5 or 6 HD NBC-owned stations showing everything under the sun. I’ve watched a lot more than I expected to going in, frankly, and it’s due to two things: having that choice where I can almost always see something I’m interested in, and the primal urge to root against cheating communists. Definitely not what I was planning to do the last couple of weeks, but it passes the time.

49

The value I got from posting that it doesn’t matter to me far exceeds any value derived from complaining about my post.

The Olympics don’t matter. The television coverage could be better or worse in other countries, and I don’t care, because I’m not watching it in other countries, either.

All in all I’ve accidentally seen about 20 minutes of Olympic coverage so far. A bit when people were hopping off a diving board, a bit where some guys were doing gymnastics, and a bit where some guys were running.

It reminded me of similar fragments of the Olympics that I saw in the past, and the same news from the past repeats as well about evil judges and such.

It’s boring, pointless, etc. to me. I’m not a big sports fan as you might gather. When the ‘Superbowl’ comes up, I always need to ask who’s playing. When the baseball season wraps up, I usually don’t even notice.

As far as curling versus hockey, I think I’m a better curling fan (for the sheer pointlessness of it) especially since they ‘cleaned up’ the NHL and stopped most of the brawling. They may as well ban car crashes from NASCAR, which is just a bunch of cars driving in circles if you don’t occasionally see one turned inside-out and burst into flames.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m certain that all the best highlights of professional athletes who have trained all their lives to get to the olympics and got hurt, or screwed up, or had a hissy-fit are preserved adequately on YouTube and/or other video sites (until the IOC gets the content deleted). I probably won’t watch them there, either.

Whatever minimal interest I might have ever have had in the Olympics was destroyed when the IOC copyrighted the word ‘Olympic’ and its derivatives, then started suing everyone that had any fragment of ‘Olympic’ in their name for any kind of silly event, like the ‘Couch Potato Olympics’ out of business, and generally acting like a bunch of software patent sluts. Similar to Hormel threatening every web site they could find that complained of SPAM (instead of ‘spam’).

Also the IOC likes to suppress free speech using copyright law.

Not that any of this matters to you die-hard TV watching rednecks.

50

There are no words for how ignorant and moronic that statement is (actually there are, but they belong in The Pit). On the surface it doesn’t even make any sense. A true intellectual would know that television is just a medium, and you can’t condemn a medium just by the content that appears on it that you disapporve of.

I could go on and on about how the anti-TV intellectual is living in a fantasy world, but instead I’ll just say you’re a <censored>. (Damn that broadcast TV addiction of mine, making my thoughts FCC-compliant!)

51

Well, aren’t you just precious!

52

Man, what are the standards on the Dope falling to, when some poster actually thinks he’s being clever by using “rednecks” as an insult to deride people watching TV indoors?

53

People get so DEFENSIVE about their television addiction.

“I can stop drinkin’ any time I wanna!”

Good luck with that.

54

pingnak, feel free to start a new thread about your opinion of the Olympics, but stop thread-shitting in this one. In addition, do not insult other posters outside the Pit (i.e., calling them ‘rednecks’).

55

I watched the BBC’s version of the closing ceremonies, and they had a recap of their coverage. My take was that it didn’t seem that much different. They still covered random sports heavily just because Great Britain was supposed to do well, like track cycling and rowing.

I was a bit surprised the announcers were much more of an us-vs-them mentality than the US ones. Instead of “The USA team made an awesome comeback”, it was “we made an awesome comeback”, with the announcers openly rooting for the GB team.

One other interesting thing was that they had a proper scorecard chart for the GB team for each sport, comparing expectations to reality. So cycling did +8 on the expected medal count so they were the winners, while another sport might have been -4 so they were really disappointing. I’ve never seen that kind of thing done formally on NBC.