I have to say so far for the 2014 Olympics, I am seriously annoyed by NBC.
First off, they apparently have no idea that people don’t want sports results spoiled. I am good lord! They have a videos section on the olympic website where you supposedly can go to watch replays of sports, but on the videos page itself they give you the results of the sports that you are trying to watch. They need at least a 24-48 hour cool down on their site before they put results in headers, and on the video section they should never give results!!!
The design of their site is also rather crappy. I said in the previous paragraph that supposedly you can watch replays, and that is because I haven’t been able to prove that most of the time. I know in previous years their video page had a listing of all sports, you pick it and then it breaks down various events and you could easily navigate to your sport. This year, they tried to make it fancy and basically you can ever find live events. I am sorry, I’m not willing to wake up at 2am just to watch an olympic sport, it isn’t worth it.
Then there is the TV network’s coverage. Commercials run rampant. I don’t behoove NBC trying to get their money out of it, but tonight they had downhill skiing, they’d show 2 random people ski, then a commercial, 2 more, a commercial. I know they had a 5 minute piece on nesting dolls tonight that was surrounded by commercials. You get very little content out of each night’s broadcast.
And that gets to the content. I know that content is always going to depend on the day because some days there just isn’t anything interesting. However, all weekend long they’ve been playing cross country skiing on in the middle of the day all day. Ok, I am all for variety in all honesty. But cross country skiing can really go with a half hour recap. There isn’t any American EVER in contention for that sport. And since NBC doesn’t understand why, it’s because Americans really don’t like that sport! It baffles my mind that NBC wouldn’t choose to put a replay of USA hockey, men’s or women’s on instead. Both of those teams are playing terrifically. In fact, there was a stellar USA vs. Russia game that they could have played Saturday. And a stellar Russia vs. Slovakia game that they could have played today. What really bothers me of their lack of hockey coverage is that NBC actually airs NHL games. You would think they would jump at the opportunity to tie NHL with the Olympics. After all, the Olympics is a time where people pay attention to sports that they don’t normally have interest like figure skating and skiing for instance. With something like Hockey, you might get someone who might actually decide they like hockey, or a certain player in the olympics (they are NHL players after all) and pick up real viewers later past the Olympics. Heck, even though both men and women curling teams are doing terribly this year, I’d take watching them lose over watching cross-country skiing.
Honestly, there was so much going into the Olympics about how terrible conditions were in Sochi and how they shouldn’t have been done in Russia because they can’t handle the games. Why does no one talk about how NBC shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast it because they similarly cannot handle it?