The Critique of NBC

I read somewhere that ESPN may bid for next winter Olympics and show all coverage LIVE (and who knows when that would be for us in the US).

I agree that other sports must be covered, and unfortunately NBC's plan to show last 6 ladies LIVE left no room for Lepisto etc. We got Tugba because she skated earlier. I don't care if I never see Tugba skate again. She is not Olympic level, I don't care where her parents come from. No parent should be expected to make such great sacrifices for a child who doesn't have the talent. Or maybe they just wanted an excuse to leave Turkey.

When the modern Olympics were set up, the decision to admit athletes by country was arbitrary and now seems crazy. The best individuals should be there (as in Greek times), based on the previous year's (or 2 years, whatever) performance.

Wish I knew! My dad just said "earlier in the night" and then guessed 9 or 930. The handing off of flags is actually quite a while before the closing ceremonies end.

It was the worst coverage ever. I did not feel like it was Olympics at all. I hope sochi is better.

Ginask8s said:

It was the worst coverage ever. I did not feel like it was Olympics at all. I hope sochi is better.

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There is still not even a bid from a US Network for the Sochi games.
NBC told IOC if they do bid it will be for considerably less than Vancouver.

IOC is shopping it around but CBS, Fox and ESPN have declined to even make an offer.

I'm kind of glad in a way. I'm not the biggest fan of IOC politics...they obviously have issues with the USOC, the latter organization is supposedly not run very well...if the IOC is hit in the pocketbook, well, I won't complain.

NBC did a horrible job. We live a few hundred miles from Vancouver, there is no good reason we should have to stay up so late on school nights to see mediocre, incomplete coverage of FS. We ended up trying to watch a variety of online sources, we have no cable, no recording device since we usually don't watch tv. Unfortunately more than a few times we ended up needing to watch NBC because the online source disappeared or froze. The gala coverage didn't help, what a crummy end to a crummy job.

With all the online sources now, I think that TV coverage will decline steadily. After the poor job NBC did, I look forward to other options. Bulgarian TV did a better job! I guess I have 4 years to learn Bulgarian before the next W. Olympics. LOL I hope NBC is reading this and other threads and will respond by making some changes before the next time.

Loved the BBC coverage when it connected, I would love to see coverage of other countries, not just the US. Canada does a great job, but we couldn't get connected to any feeds. Ah well.

One thing NBC did well was the video spots on their website. At least we can see some of the things we missed.

I loved FROMSPORTS.COM - no commentary, all skaters. NBC made some poor decisions in their coverage.

I had no trouble with the Olympics regular schedule. It was NBC's decision to tape what they believed would be the most watched afternoon comps on prime time. That was the problem. Figure Skating was left for late night viewing.

So if they got high ratings for that, good bye Figure Skating in prime time in future.

The thought occured to me that Team USA was winning so many medals in so many different sports that NBC decided viewing interest would be best served by showing all of the medal winnng performances.

It might be interesting to go back and look at the Calgary games. I think USA won a total of 6 medals there. Two were by our skaters so for the rest of the events over two weeks there were only 4 medals won. Not a whole lot to cover so the "Brians" and kati and Debbi were hyped and skating got decent coverage.

I forget who televised the '88 games but it was probably easy to focus on skating and to show alot of it because there was not much interest in other sports where we had no athletes contending for medals.

We may not like it but I can understand why NBC was showing Alpine skiing along with snowboarding and halfpipe and other events where we were winning medals.

I think it has always been a partial myth that Americans love ice skating every four years. I think because we have typically had good skaters and not too much else so good at Winter games the networks have shown us skating by default over the years.

This year it was totally different and NBC showed much more coverage of other sports because we were winning or contending for medals in them. I still don't see why they gave hockey and curling such good covergae on MSNBC and CNBC and shut out so much skating.

In Vancouver I was surprised by how good the covergae was of so many different sports but it came by sacrificing much of the skating coverage. Although posters here are skating fans the vast majority of the US public is not.

I thik NBC decided it made more sense to show events where USA was winning medals rather than showing skating - especially groups that had no USA skaters.