For the record, I have been generally pleased with how NBC is covering these Olympics. I am not sure how the scheduling has impacted the on-site fans and athletes (I often see a lot of empty seats and wonder if maybe that is due to the event being at some un-Godly hour local time), but for Americans it has been a pleasure to see so many events live. I actually time shift almost everything, but I like watching the live feed, especially because it ensures that NBC can not give in to temptation to Americanize the coverage.
In many ways the Winter Olympics are less susceptible to the hyper-parochialism that often infect the Sumer games, simply because there is less of an expectation for the US to dominate. Even so, it was appreciated by me that even with three US pairs teams in the mix for medals for the Ice Dancing, the NBC crew kept the focus where it belonged, on the Canadian and French pairs vying for Gold (though I don’t understand why Tanith was so into the French). Same with several of the biathlon competitions, where US athletes were positioned to do pretty well, but not really medal, and they were mentioned but not focused on. I don’t much like most of the Alpine (except downhill), snowboarding and sliding competitions, and it has been great to be able to watch so much of what I do like (Curling, Biathalon) either on one of the NBC channels or online (I watched a few Curling matches without any audio commenting at all, and was able to employ my Curling knowledge to have it make sense). I did not watch the Opening Ceremonies, so I don’t know how NBC handled the politics of that, or the absence of Matt. It has not been perfect - it is annoying how often I record an event that my Guide says should be Curling or Biathalon, only to see nothing of the kind as I FF through three hours of coverage of snowboarding or sliding of some kind. The worse thing to happen so far in my view was Mike Tirico signing off from the Prime Time coverage last night and giving a big at spoiler on the US Hockey match being broadcast live at that moment on NBC SportsChannel. Shouldn’t it be obvious that a lot of people would have recorded the Hockey and watched the Ice Dancing, intending to go back and watch the Hockey next? That was my plan anyway. Fortunately I am not a huge Hockey fan, so the loss was minor, but in principle I was pissed. -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- 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 [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
