The reports from Adam on UK and Chris on Canadian Olympic coverage are UCB appreciated. I think the key in comparing this to US coverage is distinguishing between NBC's prime time coverage and most other coverage on NBC outside of prime time and on cable channels. NBC prime time relies on either taped and heavily edited coverage of events like gymnastics, or heavily biased live (in the Eastern Time Zone) coverage, both with an extremely US-centric, exceptionality bias. Non-promoting coverage in the US sounds pretty much like UK and Canada - much of it is live or "lavish", if there are US medal contenders they get most of the focus, but non US medal contenders get their fair share, and of course many of these events have no US contenders. I have loved the Rugby coverage, for example, most of it live,, with most contenders in the Southern Hemisphere.
It is the 4 or 5 hours of coverage in primetime that generates most of the criticism (this is a small fraction of the total Olympic coverage I watch) and it is because this is where NBC has to earn the meat of its income to pay the heavy rights fee. The commercial per hour ratio seems unusussually high (I record and time shift everything, so I just FF commercials, but I find I have to watch primetime with the remote always in my hand ready to "zap"), and they pander to the jingoism and sentimentality of non sports fans. I find I have been watching more online coverage this year, partly because Comcast has made it so easy to watch on my tv. I got into the archery, and rather than just watch the few preliminary matches and medal rounds they showed on cable, I watched the whole thing from the online feed (though the commentary is pretty minimal, and I re-watched the ones on Cable to get more context). On Friday, 12 August 2016, David Lynch <djly...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 12, 2016 at 4:49 AM, Adam Bowie <a...@adambowie.co.uk > <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','a...@adambowie.co.uk');>> wrote: > >> And the presenters are nearly all sports presenters - not breakfast show >> presenters for example. >> > > This is also something that I'll give NBC a lot of credit for: As far as I > know, all of the people doing coverage of the individual events are retired > athletes or broadcasters who work full time on sports, and many of those > broadcasters are specialists. There's a whole army of play-by-play > announcers and expert commentators who are on their umpteenth Olympics but > who I only ever hear for two weeks every four years in the sports that only > get a lot of attention during the Olympics (e.g., swimming, diving, and > gymnastics,) in addition to the people who cover the pro game week in and > week out moving over to cover the Olympics in sports like golf, basketball, > and tennis. At worst, the US coverage seems to pair a generalist > play-by-play announcer with a former athlete. > > We do have breakfast show presenters involved, but they're doing the > opening ceremony and hosting the studio portions of the broadcast, which > essentially amounts to serving as traffic cop and doing the occasional > interview, none of which really requires a lot of deep knowledge about > sports. > -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to tvornottv@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tvornottv-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
