15 ms·

Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

277 points by bko 5y ago

h2odragon 5y ago
If you're good enough at blocking competition, it doesn't matter how poorly you do the actual job. The "AT&T" philosophy. Last Olympics I paid any attention to was because I had a C band satellite dish and could browse the backhauls and unattended camera feeds. Must have been '96 in Atlanta.
- bko 5y ago
  The "competition" isn't other broadcasts of Olympics. It's netflix, xbox, twitter and other sports options. It definitely does matter how well they do their actual job, and right now they're failing.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    ATT is not comparable to NBC. ATT has a structural monopoly, without which society cannot communicate. NBC is a glorified ad broker, and they could fall off the face of the earth and no one would notice. Of course, they are owned by Comcast, who is in similar position as ATT, so I assume Comcast is just milking these legacy companies for all they are worth. My solution is to simply not watch. If consuming entertainment content is not as simple as search, click, pay, watch, then I simply do not get enough utility from watching TV. And if I am paying, I do not want to see ad breaks, another dealbreaker.
    - dehrmann 5y ago
      In the case of a single program that's broadcast, they're somewhat comparable since NBC has a monopoly on the Olympics.
    - cmurf 5y ago
      Problem is there are enough millions of people satisfied with this delivery, that NBC will make enough money and keep their anti-competitive monopoly. Quite a lot of the content is only available with their Peacock app. Free if you have Comcast/Xfinity, but still ads. If you pay maybe you also get ads, not sure. But the app is terribly slow, next to unusable. Click navigation buttons on the remote and its multiple seconds for the UI to reflect input. Netflix, Hulu, HBOMax apps all have reasonable responsiveness, Peacock is atrocious. I imagine in less than 50 years we'll consider Google a glorified ad broker too.
      - nebula8804 5y ago
        uBLock Origin appears to work to make Peacock usable by blocking all the ads. I do recall that initially I had to do some extra blocking because they had a way around it but now uBlock appears to just work out of the box.
      - listenallyall 5y ago
        The Olympics are the monopoly. They are the ones who auction off U.S. television rights to a single entity. NBC is simply the company which won that auction. I'm curious what you think NBC is doing wrong here. Should they call up CBS and offer to share the coverage that it just spent hundreds of millions for? Should it invite randos to Tokyo with their iPhones to stream the games on Twitch? Should it just make the entire Olympics pay-per-view? As always, if you don't like it, start your own world-wide athletic contest.
        sophiaaaa 5y ago
        That’s not the point BEFORE we used to be able to see All the Countries complete not just the USA NBC has done a shit job at showing all athlete and only show the “popular” sports who win medals. Did you know that in the Tokyo this year in Germany’s Women’s gymnastics wore shorts instead of leotards, NO All they Showed you in “prime time television” was Simone Bilies this Simone that, and then every so often they show Russia who ended up doing better then the usa I don’t know about you but it literally sucks that so many of these athletes work hard and because they didn’t place in medals or are not a favorite sport you have to try and stream on peakcock which has been down since the 1st day of the Olympics Literally during the 1500m swim race while lidecky was racing for gold they aird commercials in the middle of a meddling race and gave some stupid story on how all the miles she swam in her life she could swim from Dc to Tokyo like they ruin the fact that it’s about the worlds sports and show casing everyone’s hard work not cutting out what they think is unimportant Also they sport commentators literally sound bored People have the right to be up set who are you to shit on them
- pottertheotter 5y ago
  > The "AT&T" philosophy. If anyone reads this and is wondering what exactly it means, I highly recommend the book The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T by Steve Coll.
- furyofantares 5y ago
  I feel like your anecdote about not watching the Olympics is a direct contradiction to your claim about the "AT&T philosophy"
- ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
  How was ATT not good at what they did? Yes they were a monopoly, but they provided reliable phone service to much of the US, and were required to built to cold war standards (reading about the long lines facilities is fascinating, with these massive concrete buildings and redundant backup generators). They also had an expanding wireless phone network (mostly for car phones) that was heavily rolled out by the early 80s. They put heavy research into satellite communication and laying undersea cable as well, not to mention bell labs. Many of the complaints against att are entirely valid, but I have not once heard that they were actually bad at running a phone company. That so many of the baby bells remain around in some form (ATT itself nowadays, Verizon, many local phone companies) seems to be a testament of that.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > That so many of the baby bells remain around in some form (ATT itself nowadays, Verizon, many local phone companies) seems to be a testament of that. The Baby Bells were what happened when an entrenched national monopoly was broken up into entrenched local monopolies. Their continued existence (and the reformation of many of them into the new AT&T) doesn't really prove anything about how good the old monopoly was at running things.
jeffbee 5y ago
As the last person in America with an antenna, I will note that their broadcast coverage is pretty much exactly what it has always been through the years. You turn it on and watch it.
- uxp100 5y ago
  Lol yep, it was not very difficult to tune into NBC and watch, though it was a little swimming and gymnastics heavy. I understand why, but would have preferred like 10% less, maybe just highlights from some other sports, or maybe having triathlon come on like 5 minutes earlier.
- koolba 5y ago
  The OTA broadcast is fine if you want to watch exactly what they want to show. But there’s tons of other, arguably more interesting, events as well.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    It’s not fine. They split the screen last night into commercial and B-roll event (the athletes getting ready, warms ups, etc). So 60% of the screen was commercial, 40% was something you would normally see with commentators talking about past performance, other athletes besides the USA, etc. Nope, instead, we’ll just show more commercials even though we just came back from commercial break!
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  Sure, you might be happy with the coverage they do, but I'm sure you could understand that not everyone is. There is no real reason that you cannot watch the events you want to watch - when you want to watch it - instead of whatever is playing on air when you can be at home to watch. You know, assuming you have the internet to do so.
- lizknope 5y ago
  I know a lot of people with antennas. I have Sling TV but I also have an antenna and an HD HomeRun dual TV tuner. I can record from the HD HomeRun tuner to my computer or I can connect to it from my Nvidia Shield set top boxes and watch it live.
aninteger 5y ago
It's especially difficult to watch without paying. Over the air (or locast) is about the only option but that only provides highlights or coverage of shorter events. No broadcasting of football. There was supposed to be a free tier on Peacock but everything I've seen, outside of 2-4 minute clips, requires Peacock Premium.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Yes, and my experience with the <10 minute clips I did try to watch on Peacock turned me off from the service and the games in general.
  - cad1 5y ago
    It really is a mess. I subscribed to Peacock to watch the Tour de France and planned to the cancel when it was finished. The TdF coverage was good, so I decided I would keep the subscription to watch Olympic events. I wanted to watch USWNT last Saturday morning so I startup Peacock and find out it is not available on Peacock. I do some googling and find out it is on NBC Sports Network. I install NBCSN app and discover I can watch 30 minutes of the game until I must pay to join NBCSN. I gave up, deleted NBCSN and canceled Peacock. As you mention the <10 minutes clips are frustrating. On top of that, I didn't see anything that was streaming live. All of the content was 'Replay on date/time' at least 24 hours after the results were already in.
    - listenallyall 5y ago
      This cool invention called "cable tv" would have let you watch the entire Tour and women's soccer and you wouldn't even have to download any apps!
      - TchoBeer 5y ago
        Cable TV doesn't play every event: it can't, they overlap
kevinwang 5y ago
I've been watching on the "site where you can actually watch live. And they have replays… of preliminary matches" and I've found it to be really good. You can choose any sport to watch live, or to watch the compilation broadcasts that they show on TV. You can pause and rewind broadcasts. Many of the sport titles do have the competitor or country names in them. And each stream does have a button the side to view the rules of the sport.
- annoyingmous 5y ago
  What site is this for research purposes? :)
- mattlondon 5y ago
  Which site would that be? I am not sure what you are hinting at? Sounds really useful.
  - kevinwang 5y ago
    It's in the blog post, I was quoting from it: stream.nbcolympics.com
- buzzdenver 5y ago
  Where is that site?
  - kevinwang 5y ago
    It's in the blog post, I was quoting from it: stream.nbcolympics.com
seneca 5y ago
I've had similar frustrations to the author. We tried watching the broadcast coverage. Though I didn't time it, it felt like 60% advertising. This sounds hyperbolic, but it was really blocks of ads interspersed with highlights of events and (awful) commentary the majority of the time, and then occasional full events focused on very specific sports (swimming and gymnastics). I was shocked by how bad it was. So, wanting to watch actual events, we paid for NBC's online service. It's an incoherent mess with login loops, and it still doesn't seem to include links to many of the full events, just the same highlight reels. It may be there, but after 20 minutes of searching we just gave up. NBC has butchered this event.
- 3327 5y ago
  Honestly I cannot agree more. NBC is garbage and the olympics should be the one event in the world that is all access and all rights. I cannot even find a video recap of the Tunisian swimmer winning.
golemotron 5y ago
Best experience watching the Olympics: a hotel lobby in England. Complete coverage, no chatter, no delays, and no commercials.
- Milner08 5y ago
  BBC have lost the rights this year, sadly. They can only show a few things and Discovery have the majority of them, so I and am pretty sure many people I know will not be watching.
  - monkey_monkey 5y ago
    I think the BBC can only show 2 live events at a time, unlike the previous 2 Olympics where they had amazing live coverage of pretty much every event. Can't help feeling this is a very very short-sighted move by the IOC (selling the European rights to Discovery), and will further dimish the prestige of the Games.
    - Idiot211 5y ago
      Agreed! A key thing that I don't think they realised is that the free to air rights across Europe always created an intrigue among the population that fed into the youth. No matter the background of a child in the UK, for instance, they would typically have completely free access to damn near every Olympic event. That's gone now, and that's really sad.
- maxclark 5y ago
  International coverage is lightyears better than US.
- morcheeba 5y ago
  My coach was saying she preferred the tell-it-like-it-is British commentary ("That's a devastating defeat for the xxx who has been improving and really expected to place") to the candied-up American commentary ("all that work paid off for yyy")
egberts 5y ago
Not to mention that NBC not showing the proper flag for Taiwan as they reached third place overall gold medals. I’ve got better things to do than to watch state-sponsored selective narratives.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  That's a condition of Taiwan entering the Olympics at all. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/taiwan-chinese-taipei-olympics-compromise-china/100304262 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/taiwan-chinese-taipei... I wonder, whilst looking at Hong Kong, why Taiwan would be at all worried about the One Country, Two Systems rule...
  - egberts 5y ago
    Truly shows how oppressive Mainland China government has become.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > Truly shows how oppressive Mainland China government has become. Or rather how much power they have to force their views internationally, even when those views are objectively unreasonable. Here's another recent example: https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/fast-furious-star-john-cena-apologises-calling-taiwan-country-2021-05-26/ https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/fast-furious-star-john-cen...
      - Consultant32452 5y ago
        Their tentacles are everywhere. https://freebeacon.com/media/nyt-quietly-scrubs-chinese-propaganda/ https://freebeacon.com/media/nyt-quietly-scrubs-chinese-prop...
    - whoevercares 5y ago
      “Has become”? That’s international standard until Taiwan truly declares independence. Quote Wikipedia: This dissension eventually came to a compromise when the term "Chinese Taipei" was first proposed in the Nagoya Resolution in 1979, whereby the ROC/Taiwan and the PRC/China recognize the right of participation to each other and remain as separate teams in any activities of the International Olympic Committee and its correlates. This term came into official in 1981 following a name change of Olympic Committee of the ROC to Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee. Edit: great job downvoting when it doesn’t fit your narrative
dariusj18 5y ago
I feel like NBC took a huge step back from the Olympics app from 5 years ago. It had a good organization of sports with schedules and the ability to watch replays or live events. AFAIK, streaming-wise, Peacock is the only want to watch them this year and the interface is terrible for this. Just trying to browse what is available made me decide to skip attempting to watch the games, I was willing to subscribe to Peacock too.
- smaryjerry 5y ago
  I had a similar experience. I love watching the Olympics, even obscure sports that no one cares about. In past years I’ll leave it on in the background while I do other things alL the time. This time I was attempting to watch the olympics and due to the sheer difficulty on finding what to watch I just gave up on watching them altogether. Even the website had me confused on the schedule.. are they showing Japans times or what time zone for this schedule? It’s like they actively don’t want people watching the Olympics this year.
- rewtraw 5y ago
  The Peacock app coverage is horrible. I ended up paying for Hulu + Live TV to get live coverage as well as the full backlog of replays.
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
In Australia we have the 7Plus, or 7+, app which works with Android TV and allows you to choose from various sports that are currently live, plus replays. The app requires sign in via email address, which normally would turn me away, but it's worth it to burn a throw away email address for the sake of the Olympics. There's probably a geofence, butt if you can get an Australian exit node VPN then give it a bash. These sports have been converted so far: 3x3 Basketball (great energy!) Table Tennis Badminton Rowing Skateboarding Gymnastics Swimming Equestrian Soccer Hockey Basketball Softball Handball Volleyball Tennis Water Polo
- jessaustin 5y ago
  I have signed into the "NBC Sports" app on Roku with my basic package Dish Network credentials, and that allows me to view any event live or on replay. This is in USA. I'm not sure what else we expect NBC to do here. I have watched canoeing, cycling, rugby, equestrian, TKD, sailing, etc. Of course their headline/primetime coverage is shit and doesn't know sports other than swimming and gymnastics exist. They have the Today Shitshow people running it.
  - wombat-man 5y ago
    I don't have satellite tv. I just watch with an antenna/locast. It's not really clear what I get with a peacock sub though, that might work?
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      Sign up for a ten-day (or maybe it's one week?) Hulu trial. Then you can use that as your login. If that doesn't last long enough you might be able to find another online service (Sling?) that will work without payment for a short time. (Or you could spend $20 on one month of Hulu.) If you insist on OTA, I don't know what to tell you. Broadcast TV has always sucked. It still sucks now. NBC might be the worst of the big 3.5 networks, but normal households have had cable subscriptions for about four decades now. Those who don't want to watch the Today Shitshow version of the Olympics don't really have to.
  - 5y ago
dr-detroit 5y ago
sports is all wrapped up in exclusive contracts brokered by these media guys who are all buddies. you wanna watch international sports you gotta get a euro VPN because in the USA our rich power brokers dont care about most sport.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Just let me send you $20 for an Olympics "pass" and give me access to multiple streams so I can pick which events to watch — without commercials. Is that bad business? Because I'm afraid I am sitting out the Olympics this year. :-(
- robbiemitchell 5y ago
  I suspect it would cost more than $20 to bypass the ads
  - sovnade 5y ago
    Even at an inflated rate of $50 per 1000 impressions (which is higher than most broadcast TV charges), $20 should let you bypass 400 commercials. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
    - effingwewt 5y ago
      Please Gods, no! Black Mirror is almost here. 'Just pay 100 merits to skip..Oh you've used all your skips this hour.' Beeeeeeeeep 'Resume viewing, resume viewing.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Why is this downvoted? This bleak future isn't too far off honestly. Can't wait until the advertisers start literally torturing us as punishment for withholding our attention. When I watched that episode for the first time I was horrified but reality is even worse: these people think we're literal criminals who are stealing from them if we don't watch ads.
        jazzyjackson 5y ago
        Probably because YouTube and Spotify are already peppered with such interruptions “upgrade to premium today to disable these annoying ads”
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- GoodJokes 5y ago
  On YouTube tv you can just subscribe to an Olympic sport and it records it all.
petercooper 5y ago
I've previously watched a lot of the Olympics and think it's a great way to bring the world together every now and then. Now this year you have to jump through all these hoops (pun partly intended) and you don't even get commentary for much of it - the IOC are being greedy to a new level.
throw7 5y ago
What I like about NBC Olympic broadcasts is when they cut to shots of Bode Miller's girlfriend at the bottom of the mountain every few seconds. Great stuff.
- imglorp 5y ago
  "/s" detected. This is what's wrong with most US media: it's insufficient to portray X for its own value, a spackling of drama must be applied on top and that must take priority over X.
  - quercusa 5y ago
    And pathos; don't forget the pathos!
jessaustin 5y ago
TFA is not well-informed. Maybe the NBC people should have better marketing, but the Olympics coverage is not terrible. If you have a basic cable or satellite package, you can sign into this app: https://channelstore.roku.com/search/nbc+sports https://channelstore.roku.com/search/nbc+sports Presumably some of the lesser TV appliances also have a similar app. If you don't subscribe to a basic pay TV package, maybe you could do a trial subscription to Hulu or something and sign in with that. With this app, one can watch the entirety of live and recorded events. Many of the live feeds will have "down time" between matches, rounds, etc. There are ads, which are especially annoying for "one-at-a-time" individual events like whitewater canoe slalom. I suspect it would be possible to pi-hole the ads.
- D13Fd 5y ago
  In my view, if a tech-savvy person putting significant effort in still can't find a way to view the coverage, even if they have a subscription, NBC is doing a poor job.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Searching for an app that lots of people already have installed doesn't seem like "significant effort" to me. If people don't want help or advice with this I don't see the point of this thread.
    - enumjorge 5y ago
      It's not as simple as searching for an app. It's knowing which app to search for, and how to get access to it. When I looked this up over the weekend I came across multiple answers pointing me in the direction NBC, Peacock, Hulu, and YouTube TV. Google "where to watch the olympics", and I see three options just from NBC (NBC, Peacock, and NBC Olympics) followed by list of content farm articles. Even if you manage to get access, the app is organized poorly and makes it difficult to find the content you want.
      - jessaustin 5y ago
sizzzzlerz 5y ago
You must be a youngster. NBC has been fucking up the Olympics broadcasts since they started back in 1988. They've always been overly USA-centric, they refuse to air the broadcasts when the events happen, insisting on time shifting everything, and loading so many commercials into the thing, it is impossible to watch. I pretty much quit watching 3 or 4 olympics ago. Today, as I tune through the channels, I always see they're in commercial when I go through the NBC channels.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Advertising ruins everything.
  - baltimore 5y ago
    You've misspelled it. It should be "runs".
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      Why can't we have both?
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Both are true. In the sense that advertising guts out any communications medium it touches, and animates the carcass. It's like a zombie virus.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Yes, and I wish they'd leave and stop screwing up all the stuff I care about.
  - setpatchaddress 5y ago
    But they can’t even get a feed with ads to people. I should have been able to get the NBC “live” Olympics feeds on Peacock or one of the other NBC apps at the broadcast times. Nope. Not even with ads. No dice. Cord-cutters are SOL (if you don’t want to put up an antenna or don’t have local NBC reception). This is how you handle the Olympics if you want the ratings to nosedive.
cflat 5y ago
Find yourself a canadian VPN endpoint and check out the CBC coverage (website or "Gem" app). It's pretty complete and much more accessible.
- ape4 5y ago
  23 hours a day! And lots of live - of that's the middle of the night in USA/Canada
- slantyyz 5y ago
  FWIW, Amazon Prime Video in Canada also has the CBC coverage for free. Not quite sure what the value add is though.
- giarc 5y ago
  We also watch on the CBC Gem Apple TV app. It seems to have everything we want... live events, replay events, "PrimeTime" coverage where they switch between popular events with commentators. We even watched USA vs ROC men's indoor volleyball last night. There were no commentators, just the live feed of the match. It was odd to listen to an empty gym with no commentary but at least we were able to watch.
nyjah 5y ago
The NBC youtube channel does a great job of posting highlights but they also put spoilers in the titles of their videos and it ruins the highlights for me. Looking at the latest video "Katie Ledecky Looks Dominant In 1500m Swim..." Let me know its the 1500m swim event and quit ruining the intrigue before I can click.
fireball_blaze 5y ago
On the modern Olympics: it helps to remember that it is now an advertising event that happens to have sports competitions.
- teorema 5y ago
  There's so many ethical problems constantly overshadowing the Olympics that it's hard for me to enjoy watching them. I have some excitement for the athletes but no longer make a point of watching them. It's a shame because it's a good idea, but there's a lot if changes that need to happened; coverage is just the tip of the iceberg.
- supportlocal4h 5y ago
  Not so. You're 20+ years late for that. When you require viewers to create accounts with individual identity, you've gone beyond advertising. Of course you might argue that the modern ad industry has evolved beyond advertising. We have just failed to relabel it.
- eplanit 5y ago
  I'm so done with the f-ing Olympics. They're just a vast marketing scam that countries and cities buy into -- often acting against the wishes of their own people. The cities that host them see more negative impact than positive; and, frankly, the coverage is boring. After the last fiasco in Brazil, I was hoping it would drive a spike into the heart of the old relic -- maybe the tremendous loss on the investments in Tokyo will help it end . The summer games are the only ones any mass audience really cares about anymore, true?
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    > The summer games are the only ones any mass audience really cares about anymore, true? Not if you're in a wintry country.
    - mousepilot 5y ago
      2018 super g was an amazing contest, I was able to download it after the fact, very enjoyable, from what I read it wasn't very good live.
legitster 5y ago
I don't understand why the Olympics have to be so fast. Build an insane amount of infrastructure, have dozens of events simultaneously all of the time, then ship everyone home. I end up missing just about everything. If I want to catch some of the storylines, I really need them spoon fed to me. If they stretched out the events over a month or two we would get double benefits - we could actually consume more of the events, and they would drastically reduce their need to build venues/villages/etc.
- dairylee 5y ago
  I believe one of the reasons for this is that in general the sporting calendar is pretty full and this two week period in July/August is always empty.
  - giarc 5y ago
    But aren't most sporting calendars built around the Olympics? I'm not talking MLB, NBA etc, but all other sports (athletics, swimming, gymnastics etc) have their World Cups and qualifying etc scheduled specifically to prepare for the Olympics.
    - secabeen 5y ago
      The US pro sports are the tail that wags the dog.
      - giarc 5y ago
        Sure but let's look at a few. NBA - just finished season, many players, even those that played in the playoffs have made the trip to Toyoko. So seems like the NBA could continue to supply players for the Olympics. Golf - they could continue to play at the Olympics since an event could easily be scheduled for a Thursday-Sunday as usual. MLB - no event NHL - winter event that has supplied players, but it is an issue as the Olympics occur right in the middle of their season. NFL - no event Tennis/ATP - super long season normally, could make it a Grand Slam event, or a 1000 event and schedule into season every 4 years. One difficult thing is that doubles teams aren't always from same country. So they would need to mix and therefore affect rankings. I think it could easily be done for most leagues. The issue is money. The NBA/NHL/PGA/ATP have no immediate financial motivation for sending their players but carry risk in that players can get injured. However, if they see the Olympics as a new source of fans (and therefore income) it could be a win-win.
samkelly 5y ago
Just FYI, the pictogram sequence was my favorite part of the opening ceremony.
helen___keller 5y ago
Having watched a bunch over the weekend, my opinion is it feels very 20th century. It's about what you'd expect from a TV broadcast and not much more. Had me wishing that it was broadcast on Twitch or Youtube instead.
sergers 5y ago
In Canada, it's on CBC and tsn networks. CBC comes on free to air cable if u have an antenna, and they have an app for free access even if not a tv subscriber. Plus they have a deal with Amazon Prime, the CBC live streams of events are available though Amazon Prime too.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  I wish google would buy the American rights and put it onto YouTube. 4K video for everything. High frame rates. You name it. That or twitch but I don’t think twitch does 4K and it’s client apps aren’t pervasive like YouTube. They don’t even have an Apple TV app.
  - ascagnel_ 5y ago
    Twitch does have an Apple TV app, but they support fewer devices than YouTube and they top out at 1080p60 SDR.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    If Google could just buy the Olympics that’d be great. Apparently global revenue is only a few billion dollars, so really it could be organized and funded by a single wealthy patron to let the world watch sports together. Edit: but even if it was just YouTube doing something profitable that would be much better than the current situation with NBC. I guess we’ll check back in 2036.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
NBC's Olympic coverage ... the only reason I've ever found to pay for an IP proxy in the UK so that I could watch the BBC coverage instead. ps. I did try to pay for a UK TV license too but they don't seem to have the concept of someone outside the UK paying for this.
- te_chris 5y ago
  Oh that’s gone and got cocked up too. Discovery have paid a fortune for the europe-wide individual streaming rights, so BBC can only broadcast two streams at a time. You can only watch the individual sports streams on Eurosport/Discovery plus. This is a kafkaesque mess though - e.g. PS only has Eurosport app, but to sign up and subscribe, you have to go through discovery+, whose credentials can’t log you in to Eurosport; obviously a huge improvement over just having it all on the BBC….
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    But I thought uk left Europe :(
    - nanna 5y ago
      The EU.
    - pdenton 5y ago
      No, they exited the european union. They didn't actually move their entire country outside of europe.
    - scaryclam 5y ago
      EU != Europe. The UK left the political and economic union called the EU, they are still very much part of Europe.
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        Huh, I was thinking of Europe as a political entity such that "Exclusive rights to broadcast in Europe" would exclude UK, but TIL thanks
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
The Olympics happen too damned fast. On the very first day after opening we get gold medal results of competitions. NBC assumes that the US crowd wants to see more events than others, so a lot of them never get shown. We just get surprised with announcements of placements, which takes all the suspense out of the games. At the same time, US media is under no obligation to keep results under wraps, which means that they get reported in realtime before we get to see them on TV. So they have that to deal with. But that doesn't excuse the ridiculous amount of zoom calls from D-league commentators and celebrities who waste valuable time that could have been used to show events to instead gush incoherently about "what the Olympics mean to me." Really, nobody cares. And if they did care, we have social media for them to express their opinions.
supportlocal4h 5y ago
Remember the good ol' days when you waited for the results to get published in the newspaper? They're back.
cbsks 5y ago
The Peacock app from NBC is terrible for a different reason. It has a page for each sport, but the first thing it lists is highlight clips named things like "See <country X>'s win in all angles!". Please don't show me spoilers before you give me the opportunity to watch the event!!
goshx 5y ago
The way they cut the transmission live to display commercials, including the live comments and replays, is infuriating. Seeing the same ad over and over and over again while trying to pay attention to the action makes me mad at the company advertising and it's not even their fault.
mstade 5y ago
Discovery is the network broadcasting the Olympics here in Sweden, and they're doing an awful job as well. Especially the app is useless, with very annoying compression artifacts all over feeds with panning camera shots or even medium paced action. Trying to watch the new surfing event with all the white foam and waves was an exercise in patience for sure. But the thing that really drives me up the walls is that the commentator feed on some (maybe all?) events is a second or so too early. The new skateboarding events were completely ruined by hearing the commentators reacting to falls etc, a second or so before you actually see it.
downrightmike 5y ago
Who cares about the olympics? Seriously, who is watching this? Who is the target market?
- mattlondon 5y ago
  I for one enjoy watching it. A bunch of people I know like to watch it too (and they don't really "do" sports normally). At least in the UK, it gets prime-time billing on one of the major BBC channels.
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  Lot's of people. Just because you may not care about sports doesnt mean massive amounts of people around the world don't. Several countries will win their first gold this year. That's a national achievement. Several sports will be included for the first time this year. That is a whole set of people who get to see their favorite hobby included in the games. Many new world records will be set which is an example of technology, humans, and science all working together to achieve things thought impossible before. Many people care about the Olympics for many reasons.
  - downrightmike 5y ago
    Worth $20 billion though? with what will end up being completely wasted resources/buildings etc by August? No olympic venue has actually done any where near the amount of good and improvement to a city anywhere near the cost.
    - Taylor_OD 5y ago
      Sure. Could we spend that $20 billion better every four years? Absolutely. Would we? Not a chance.
- mullen 5y ago
  I'm not a sports person at all but every two years, my wife and I watch tons of Olympics. It's really weird for us since I probably watch 1 hour of sports per year but during the Olympics (Winter and Summer), we will sit down and watch 3 - 5 hours each day. Sports that we have no interest in outside of the Olympics.
ezconnect 5y ago
The question is why is it so hard to watch the Olympics now that you can't watch it live. It should be as easy as going to a URL and pick what you want to watch.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  So much this. Fencing was only played once at 5am EST. Finding somewhere to watch recordings is impossible.
  - mousepilot 5y ago
    I downloaded the gold metal match from youtube because seemed like an interesting story, the video was very incomplete. It would have been cool to see the entire match.
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
Given that the event is in Japan, I'm curious why someone would hire a US-based service to stream it rather than just a Japanese based one. Actually, I'm surprised the Olympics themselves don't have a direct subscription for streaming the entire event where people can sign up and stream it. I'm under the impression that the event is designed for the PHYSICAL audience first, and streaming it is kind of a poorly though out last minute thing.
- afavour 5y ago
  > Actually, I'm surprised the Olympics themselves don't have a direct subscription for streaming the entire event NBC (and other networks around the world) pay incredible amounts of money for those rights. And the arrangement makes sense for both parties: NBC can use it to boost viewing figures of their own shows in a way the Olympics couldn't/wouldn't. And they have surfaces to advertise coverage that the Olympics doesn't, or would have to go to considerable lengths to get. So it's a value multiplier for the Olympics to sell it rather than handle it themselves. In the words of the (NBC) TV Show 30 Rock: "You can't fight synergy, Lemon. It's bigger than all of us"
  - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
    These things never cease to amaze me. Basically NBC can buy the rights so that people can't just go and buy the stream from the source, but *must* go through this middleman. Image if you could buy the rights to bread, and anyone wanting to sell/buy bread *must* go through you. I honestly can't fathom how we'd decayed into societies that allows this kind of nonsense.
- bananapub 5y ago
  ? because the IOC prints money every four years by selling geo-restricted rights in every country in the world.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    I was curious just how much money they printed and found a very nicely put together pdf [0] (page 27 Olympic Broadcasting Revenue Generation) that puts it at 2 or 3 billion USD income for the summer games, and confirms that 72% of Olympic Committee revenue is broadcasting rights. For a global event, getting 50 cents per person seems like a pretty good target, but it’s a shame that a lot of people are unable to watch a lot of the sport since broadcasters pick and choose what to show. I’m sure there’s alternative revenue streams if they got creative but the doc also points out these are long term, stable partnerships where everybody’s happy (except apparently the spectators !) [0] https://stillmed.olympic.org/media/Document%20Library/OlympicOrg/Documents/IOC-Marketing-and-Broadcasting-General-Files/Olympic-Marketing-Fact-File.pdf https://stillmed.olympic.org/media/Document%20Library/Olympi...
jressey 5y ago
I love to talk shit on huge broadcasters but using their app for the olympics has been amazing. I just watched 2 days of replays from their app, all with minimal or no commentary, and all with few commercials (like 1/30 minutes). Not only do you get replays for literally every event, but they don't even spoil them with the final scores or results. Edit: It looks like I failed to mention that cable is required so that's a huge caveat. Also some folks seem to get more commercials than I have.
- lake_vincent 5y ago
  Agreed - just log into app via cable provider and voila, Olympic paradise.
  - tedajax 5y ago
    And if you don't have cable?
    - nrjames 5y ago
      This is the problem I'm experiencing. The best I've found is fuboTV and it's not great. I don't have cable in my house. I'd be willing to pay NBC $100 for access to all of their live and on-demand olympic coverage (what's available through the website, etc.), but that's not even an option.
      - dtparr 5y ago
        Can you not login to the nbc olympics site/app using your fuboTV login and get access to exactly what you're looking for? [0] They also list youtube TV and Sling TV as login options. [0] - Literally asking, as I can see they're available as sign-in TV Providers, but can't test it without a sub.
        nrjames 5y ago
        It appears to specifically be "Sign in with your Cable Provider." They list the providers and fuboTV is not one of them. EDIT: I was wrong! I used "search all providers" and indeed, fuboTV was listed there, so I signed in with the credentials and it seems to work. Thanks for the nudge!
totalZero 5y ago
If you have cable TV, you can watch everything at nbcolympics.com/schedule so it’s actually quite accessible. I believe you can watch 30 minutes of content without signing in using your cable account. Also, the author is wrong. NBC broadcast the opening ceremonies at 7am [0]. The author must have seen a rebroadcast. [0] https://sports.nbcsports.com/2021/07/23/when-do-the-tokyo-olympics-start-opening-ceremony-schedule-date-time-tv/ https://sports.nbcsports.com/2021/07/23/when-do-the-tokyo-ol...
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Requiring the purchase of an unrelated product for no reason other than padding subscriber numbers for NBC’s benefit qualifies as “making it difficult”.
  - totalZero 5y ago
    Several of the tv stations broadcasting the olympics are on cable (eg USA). I understand the desire to watch for free, but cable is certainly not an unrelated product here. If you have a raspberry pi you can probably set up a vpn at a house with cable and watch it that way. For my provider I think they simply match the IP to the ISP (the login was automatic).
    - quickthrowman 5y ago
      Comcast owns NBC and directly benefits from cable subscriptions. NBC also owns all the rights and doesn’t have to put stuff on the cable channels it owns. That’s why people are complaining.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Cable is unrelated if you have access to broadband internet and the digital video signals are being transmitted via the internet. Cable is only related if you own a cable company and want to continue making money for being an unnecessary middleman.
- Brendinooo 5y ago
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Between US (NBC), Canada (CBC), and the UK (BBC), Canada’s CBC site seems the best. I’m still disappointed at the number of replays not available. Does anyone know of a country with better coverage to VPN into?
- forgot-my-pw 5y ago
  Wish there's a premium service directly from the Olympics where you can select the sport and match to want to watch. This doesn't seem to cover even half of the event: https://www.cbc.ca/player/sports/olympics/replays https://www.cbc.ca/player/sports/olympics/replays
zeruch 5y ago
Parent firm Comcast sets the bar for abject trash customer care; given NBC was never well managed for at least the last 15-20 years, its surviving on a back catalog of content, and periodic strangle holds on stuff like the Olympics, which it strip-mines for ad rev.
kuraudo 5y ago
Very interesting; I wonder if the reported viewership dropoff is because the numbers come from cable viewership numbers only, drop in interest in the Olympics in general, or what this article is talking about regarding making it so hard to actually watch. For myself, the only reason I was reminded the Olympics were a thing was because of articles like this.
ManBlanket 5y ago
By far the easiest option is to use your VPN to watch the Olympics on the CBC.
tyingq 5y ago
I'm using Stremium with Locast. Stremium is a cloud-based DVR service that can take in and record other services like Locast. Still pretty new, and there are occasional bugs, but it's working well for me. Stremium is $5/month for 50 hours of DVR storage and another $5/month for Locast to turn off the subscription nags. Works on Web, Android, AndroidTV, FireTV, and Roku.
rel2thr 5y ago
I’ve found that if you sign up for a month of YouTube tv and then use the nbc olympics app, it’s a pretty decent experience. Oh and then you also need peacock to watch some basketball games At first I tried sling but they didn’t have the full family of nbc networks
wscott 5y ago
I have a plex lifetime subscription and a TV tuner in the attic with an antenna that can see local TV stations. My server in the basement runs Plex and can connect to the tuner over ethernet. I told plex to record all Olympic events and to mark the commercials. The result is still a mess, but I have everything NBC broadcasts and a "skip commercials" button pops up for all of the true commercials. I still get all the annoying talking heads and other commercial endorsements that are not commercials, but I can scan forward until the thumbnails match what I want to see. The Olympics every 4 years is one of the main reasons I justify plex.
- asciimov 5y ago
  Depending on where you are, you are at best getting highlights. I like watching the sports they don't like showing. Nothing worse than NBC claiming they will be showing one sport only to find that it was 30 minutes of talking heads and some gymnast/swimmers life story.
Imnimo 5y ago
Even once you find the thing you want to watch, actually watching it on NBC streaming has been a miserable experience. Moving the mouse anywhere over the entire broadcast window brings up video controls along the bottom of the screen, which take 5+ seconds to fade after you stop moving. These controls are very opaque, and obscure the bottom 10th or so of the video. This tends to block things like athlete names/countries, timers, scores, etc. Ads play, but do not pause the underlying broadcast. They will interrupt commentators mid-sentence, and will return to the broadcast in the middle of actual competition (for example, they might try to sneak an ad in between Badminton points, but the ad is longer than the intra-point break).
xyzzy21 5y ago
Honestly NBC hasn't been good at presenting the Olympics since 1976. That's probably the last time it was worth watching!
Fredvk 5y ago
As a german what is being described here seems crazy, we have to pay taxes which pay for state financed Independent media and it is also required that all important sporting events can not be behind paywalls. You can watch a germany focused broadcast of the olympics all day with minimal ads which only play maybe every hour or you can watch live streams of all events online or trough their app. Most streams also have dedicated commentators that seem reasonably knowledgable about the sports and have quite extensive background knowledge about the athletes and the last years in the sport. It has honestly been a blast watching all kinds of events i would never watch and having someone who is really in to it take you along for the ride
- lilibug1 5y ago
  Is there any way to watch a replay of German coverage by sport? I've been looking but I can't find anything :(
thehappypm 5y ago
I want to plug locast. They are not huge yet, but basically provide a streaming equivalent of broadcast TV, letting you stream your local broadcast instead of needing an antenna. With how flaky antennas are it's an awesome service, and a non-profit.
ck2 5y ago
Not exactly what they mean but this helps: https://nbcolympics.com/schedule https://nbcolympics.com/schedule
iamevn 5y ago
At least it's all in one place. Watching MLS has a huge pain because games are seemingly randomly split between Fox and ESPN and it's a crapshoot which streaming service we need to use each week to watch our team play I would happily pay someone on the order of $100 to stream a season of MLS at broadcast quality, more if it means less ads. While stadiums were empty they digitally overlaid ads on the empty seats really poorly so that it didn't quite track camera motion and the ball would just disappear behind the ads whenever it was up in the air. Thanks to exclusivity deals and region locking, I can't just choose a different service when the only product available is garbage.
aidenn0 5y ago
I love following taekwondo and I've just given up trying to use NBC's website and just get a VPN to the BBC version. I'll have to see if that works this year or not.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
man so much whinging. This guy is not the target market and clearly NBC only half-cares but is in a position to do so and the eyeballs they get from the "home at 5PM, turn on feed and leave it running til 11PM" is enough for the advertisers and the operation on a nightly. This is likely how it's been for 20 years so this is nothing new.
- NearAP 5y ago
  How is this 'so much whinging? He clearly explains what his pain is and also adds the fact that maybe NBC did not optimize for him. He further adds that even for the people NBC is optimizing for, he thinks (his own opinion) that those people might not be best served by this approach.
rednerrus 5y ago
If you have youtubetv, you can watch and record everything with the push of a button.
jollybean 5y ago
Convention and event sites are generally very bad. In the age of Google, it's hard to find out when something is happening and to get the most relevant details, especially viewing options. This is a kind of UX experience that transcends an individual entity. I think a lack of standards and means to merge information (i.e. TV schedules for each nation) is a problem. Having really good APIs and data standards across the board would help aka event times, locations, geocoridnates, relevant links, you could practically build you own ux on top of that.
BrUSSELL03 5y ago
Why is NBC not showing the medal ceremonies? It’s like watching a 2 hour movie and it cuts off at 1 hour 50 minutes and you don’t see the best part!!!
drewber 5y ago
To start with nbc is a bunch of leftists. So, to start, it never shows any shooting sports on TV. NBC announced this anti-gun move years ago. So, when there was no streaming, there was no shooting to be found. Second, because they are leftists, they push coverage of more interesting sports to show endless women’s soccer. I know soccer gets more popular in the US each year. But, women’s soccer is not a sport the majority of people want to watch, especially since so many on the team hate the US.

277 points by bko 5y ago

If you're good enough at blocking competition, it doesn't matter how poorly you do the actual job. The "AT&T" philosophy. Last Olympics I paid any attention to was because I had a C band satellite dish and could browse the backhauls and unattended camera feeds. Must have been '96 in Atlanta.

bko 5y ago
The "competition" isn't other broadcasts of Olympics. It's netflix, xbox, twitter and other sports options. It definitely does matter how well they do their actual job, and right now they're failing.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  ATT is not comparable to NBC. ATT has a structural monopoly, without which society cannot communicate. NBC is a glorified ad broker, and they could fall off the face of the earth and no one would notice. Of course, they are owned by Comcast, who is in similar position as ATT, so I assume Comcast is just milking these legacy companies for all they are worth. My solution is to simply not watch. If consuming entertainment content is not as simple as search, click, pay, watch, then I simply do not get enough utility from watching TV. And if I am paying, I do not want to see ad breaks, another dealbreaker.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    In the case of a single program that's broadcast, they're somewhat comparable since NBC has a monopoly on the Olympics.
  - cmurf 5y ago
    Problem is there are enough millions of people satisfied with this delivery, that NBC will make enough money and keep their anti-competitive monopoly. Quite a lot of the content is only available with their Peacock app. Free if you have Comcast/Xfinity, but still ads. If you pay maybe you also get ads, not sure. But the app is terribly slow, next to unusable. Click navigation buttons on the remote and its multiple seconds for the UI to reflect input. Netflix, Hulu, HBOMax apps all have reasonable responsiveness, Peacock is atrocious. I imagine in less than 50 years we'll consider Google a glorified ad broker too.
    - nebula8804 5y ago
      uBLock Origin appears to work to make Peacock usable by blocking all the ads. I do recall that initially I had to do some extra blocking because they had a way around it but now uBlock appears to just work out of the box.
    - listenallyall 5y ago
      The Olympics are the monopoly. They are the ones who auction off U.S. television rights to a single entity. NBC is simply the company which won that auction. I'm curious what you think NBC is doing wrong here. Should they call up CBS and offer to share the coverage that it just spent hundreds of millions for? Should it invite randos to Tokyo with their iPhones to stream the games on Twitch? Should it just make the entire Olympics pay-per-view? As always, if you don't like it, start your own world-wide athletic contest.
      - sophiaaaa 5y ago
        That’s not the point BEFORE we used to be able to see All the Countries complete not just the USA NBC has done a shit job at showing all athlete and only show the “popular” sports who win medals. Did you know that in the Tokyo this year in Germany’s Women’s gymnastics wore shorts instead of leotards, NO All they Showed you in “prime time television” was Simone Bilies this Simone that, and then every so often they show Russia who ended up doing better then the usa I don’t know about you but it literally sucks that so many of these athletes work hard and because they didn’t place in medals or are not a favorite sport you have to try and stream on peakcock which has been down since the 1st day of the Olympics Literally during the 1500m swim race while lidecky was racing for gold they aird commercials in the middle of a meddling race and gave some stupid story on how all the miles she swam in her life she could swim from Dc to Tokyo like they ruin the fact that it’s about the worlds sports and show casing everyone’s hard work not cutting out what they think is unimportant Also they sport commentators literally sound bored People have the right to be up set who are you to shit on them
pottertheotter 5y ago
> The "AT&T" philosophy. If anyone reads this and is wondering what exactly it means, I highly recommend the book The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T by Steve Coll.
furyofantares 5y ago
I feel like your anecdote about not watching the Olympics is a direct contradiction to your claim about the "AT&T philosophy"
ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
How was ATT not good at what they did? Yes they were a monopoly, but they provided reliable phone service to much of the US, and were required to built to cold war standards (reading about the long lines facilities is fascinating, with these massive concrete buildings and redundant backup generators). They also had an expanding wireless phone network (mostly for car phones) that was heavily rolled out by the early 80s. They put heavy research into satellite communication and laying undersea cable as well, not to mention bell labs. Many of the complaints against att are entirely valid, but I have not once heard that they were actually bad at running a phone company. That so many of the baby bells remain around in some form (ATT itself nowadays, Verizon, many local phone companies) seems to be a testament of that.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > That so many of the baby bells remain around in some form (ATT itself nowadays, Verizon, many local phone companies) seems to be a testament of that. The Baby Bells were what happened when an entrenched national monopoly was broken up into entrenched local monopolies. Their continued existence (and the reformation of many of them into the new AT&T) doesn't really prove anything about how good the old monopoly was at running things.

jeffbee 5y ago

As the last person in America with an antenna, I will note that their broadcast coverage is pretty much exactly what it has always been through the years. You turn it on and watch it.

uxp100 5y ago
Lol yep, it was not very difficult to tune into NBC and watch, though it was a little swimming and gymnastics heavy. I understand why, but would have preferred like 10% less, maybe just highlights from some other sports, or maybe having triathlon come on like 5 minutes earlier.
koolba 5y ago
The OTA broadcast is fine if you want to watch exactly what they want to show. But there’s tons of other, arguably more interesting, events as well.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  It’s not fine. They split the screen last night into commercial and B-roll event (the athletes getting ready, warms ups, etc). So 60% of the screen was commercial, 40% was something you would normally see with commentators talking about past performance, other athletes besides the USA, etc. Nope, instead, we’ll just show more commercials even though we just came back from commercial break!
Broken_Hippo 5y ago
Sure, you might be happy with the coverage they do, but I'm sure you could understand that not everyone is. There is no real reason that you cannot watch the events you want to watch - when you want to watch it - instead of whatever is playing on air when you can be at home to watch. You know, assuming you have the internet to do so.
lizknope 5y ago
I know a lot of people with antennas. I have Sling TV but I also have an antenna and an HD HomeRun dual TV tuner. I can record from the HD HomeRun tuner to my computer or I can connect to it from my Nvidia Shield set top boxes and watch it live.

aninteger 5y ago

It's especially difficult to watch without paying. Over the air (or locast) is about the only option but that only provides highlights or coverage of shorter events. No broadcasting of football. There was supposed to be a free tier on Peacock but everything I've seen, outside of 2-4 minute clips, requires Peacock Premium.

deleted 5y ago
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TchoBeer 5y ago
Yes, and my experience with the <10 minute clips I did try to watch on Peacock turned me off from the service and the games in general.
- cad1 5y ago
  It really is a mess. I subscribed to Peacock to watch the Tour de France and planned to the cancel when it was finished. The TdF coverage was good, so I decided I would keep the subscription to watch Olympic events. I wanted to watch USWNT last Saturday morning so I startup Peacock and find out it is not available on Peacock. I do some googling and find out it is on NBC Sports Network. I install NBCSN app and discover I can watch 30 minutes of the game until I must pay to join NBCSN. I gave up, deleted NBCSN and canceled Peacock. As you mention the <10 minutes clips are frustrating. On top of that, I didn't see anything that was streaming live. All of the content was 'Replay on date/time' at least 24 hours after the results were already in.
  - listenallyall 5y ago
    This cool invention called "cable tv" would have let you watch the entire Tour and women's soccer and you wouldn't even have to download any apps!
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      Cable TV doesn't play every event: it can't, they overlap

kevinwang 5y ago

I've been watching on the "site where you can actually watch live. And they have replays… of preliminary matches" and I've found it to be really good. You can choose any sport to watch live, or to watch the compilation broadcasts that they show on TV. You can pause and rewind broadcasts. Many of the sport titles do have the competitor or country names in them. And each stream does have a button the side to view the rules of the sport.

annoyingmous 5y ago
What site is this for research purposes? :)
mattlondon 5y ago
Which site would that be? I am not sure what you are hinting at? Sounds really useful.
- kevinwang 5y ago
  It's in the blog post, I was quoting from it: stream.nbcolympics.com
buzzdenver 5y ago
Where is that site?
- kevinwang 5y ago
  It's in the blog post, I was quoting from it: stream.nbcolympics.com

seneca 5y ago

I've had similar frustrations to the author. We tried watching the broadcast coverage. Though I didn't time it, it felt like 60% advertising. This sounds hyperbolic, but it was really blocks of ads interspersed with highlights of events and (awful) commentary the majority of the time, and then occasional full events focused on very specific sports (swimming and gymnastics). I was shocked by how bad it was. So, wanting to watch actual events, we paid for NBC's online service. It's an incoherent mess with login loops, and it still doesn't seem to include links to many of the full events, just the same highlight reels. It may be there, but after 20 minutes of searching we just gave up. NBC has butchered this event.

3327 5y ago
Honestly I cannot agree more. NBC is garbage and the olympics should be the one event in the world that is all access and all rights. I cannot even find a video recap of the Tunisian swimmer winning.

golemotron 5y ago

Best experience watching the Olympics: a hotel lobby in England. Complete coverage, no chatter, no delays, and no commercials.

Milner08 5y ago
BBC have lost the rights this year, sadly. They can only show a few things and Discovery have the majority of them, so I and am pretty sure many people I know will not be watching.
- monkey_monkey 5y ago
  I think the BBC can only show 2 live events at a time, unlike the previous 2 Olympics where they had amazing live coverage of pretty much every event. Can't help feeling this is a very very short-sighted move by the IOC (selling the European rights to Discovery), and will further dimish the prestige of the Games.
  - Idiot211 5y ago
    Agreed! A key thing that I don't think they realised is that the free to air rights across Europe always created an intrigue among the population that fed into the youth. No matter the background of a child in the UK, for instance, they would typically have completely free access to damn near every Olympic event. That's gone now, and that's really sad.
maxclark 5y ago
International coverage is lightyears better than US.
morcheeba 5y ago
My coach was saying she preferred the tell-it-like-it-is British commentary ("That's a devastating defeat for the xxx who has been improving and really expected to place") to the candied-up American commentary ("all that work paid off for yyy")

egberts 5y ago

Not to mention that NBC not showing the proper flag for Taiwan as they reached third place overall gold medals. I’ve got better things to do than to watch state-sponsored selective narratives.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago
That's a condition of Taiwan entering the Olympics at all. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/taiwan-chinese-taipei-olympics-compromise-china/100304262 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/taiwan-chinese-taipei... I wonder, whilst looking at Hong Kong, why Taiwan would be at all worried about the One Country, Two Systems rule...
- egberts 5y ago
  Truly shows how oppressive Mainland China government has become.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Truly shows how oppressive Mainland China government has become. Or rather how much power they have to force their views internationally, even when those views are objectively unreasonable. Here's another recent example: https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/fast-furious-star-john-cena-apologises-calling-taiwan-country-2021-05-26/ https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/fast-furious-star-john-cen...
    - Consultant32452 5y ago
      Their tentacles are everywhere. https://freebeacon.com/media/nyt-quietly-scrubs-chinese-propaganda/ https://freebeacon.com/media/nyt-quietly-scrubs-chinese-prop...
  - whoevercares 5y ago
    “Has become”? That’s international standard until Taiwan truly declares independence. Quote Wikipedia: This dissension eventually came to a compromise when the term "Chinese Taipei" was first proposed in the Nagoya Resolution in 1979, whereby the ROC/Taiwan and the PRC/China recognize the right of participation to each other and remain as separate teams in any activities of the International Olympic Committee and its correlates. This term came into official in 1981 following a name change of Olympic Committee of the ROC to Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee. Edit: great job downvoting when it doesn’t fit your narrative

dariusj18 5y ago

I feel like NBC took a huge step back from the Olympics app from 5 years ago. It had a good organization of sports with schedules and the ability to watch replays or live events. AFAIK, streaming-wise, Peacock is the only want to watch them this year and the interface is terrible for this. Just trying to browse what is available made me decide to skip attempting to watch the games, I was willing to subscribe to Peacock too.

smaryjerry 5y ago
I had a similar experience. I love watching the Olympics, even obscure sports that no one cares about. In past years I’ll leave it on in the background while I do other things alL the time. This time I was attempting to watch the olympics and due to the sheer difficulty on finding what to watch I just gave up on watching them altogether. Even the website had me confused on the schedule.. are they showing Japans times or what time zone for this schedule? It’s like they actively don’t want people watching the Olympics this year.
rewtraw 5y ago
The Peacock app coverage is horrible. I ended up paying for Hulu + Live TV to get live coverage as well as the full backlog of replays.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

In Australia we have the 7Plus, or 7+, app which works with Android TV and allows you to choose from various sports that are currently live, plus replays. The app requires sign in via email address, which normally would turn me away, but it's worth it to burn a throw away email address for the sake of the Olympics. There's probably a geofence, butt if you can get an Australian exit node VPN then give it a bash. These sports have been converted so far: 3x3 Basketball (great energy!) Table Tennis Badminton Rowing Skateboarding Gymnastics Swimming Equestrian Soccer Hockey Basketball Softball Handball Volleyball Tennis Water Polo

jessaustin 5y ago
I have signed into the "NBC Sports" app on Roku with my basic package Dish Network credentials, and that allows me to view any event live or on replay. This is in USA. I'm not sure what else we expect NBC to do here. I have watched canoeing, cycling, rugby, equestrian, TKD, sailing, etc. Of course their headline/primetime coverage is shit and doesn't know sports other than swimming and gymnastics exist. They have the Today Shitshow people running it.
- wombat-man 5y ago
  I don't have satellite tv. I just watch with an antenna/locast. It's not really clear what I get with a peacock sub though, that might work?
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    Sign up for a ten-day (or maybe it's one week?) Hulu trial. Then you can use that as your login. If that doesn't last long enough you might be able to find another online service (Sling?) that will work without payment for a short time. (Or you could spend $20 on one month of Hulu.) If you insist on OTA, I don't know what to tell you. Broadcast TV has always sucked. It still sucks now. NBC might be the worst of the big 3.5 networks, but normal households have had cable subscriptions for about four decades now. Those who don't want to watch the Today Shitshow version of the Olympics don't really have to.
- 5y ago

dr-detroit 5y ago

sports is all wrapped up in exclusive contracts brokered by these media guys who are all buddies. you wanna watch international sports you gotta get a euro VPN because in the USA our rich power brokers dont care about most sport.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Just let me send you $20 for an Olympics "pass" and give me access to multiple streams so I can pick which events to watch — without commercials. Is that bad business? Because I'm afraid I am sitting out the Olympics this year. :-(

robbiemitchell 5y ago
I suspect it would cost more than $20 to bypass the ads
- sovnade 5y ago
  Even at an inflated rate of $50 per 1000 impressions (which is higher than most broadcast TV charges), $20 should let you bypass 400 commercials. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
  - effingwewt 5y ago
    Please Gods, no! Black Mirror is almost here. 'Just pay 100 merits to skip..Oh you've used all your skips this hour.' Beeeeeeeeep 'Resume viewing, resume viewing.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Why is this downvoted? This bleak future isn't too far off honestly. Can't wait until the advertisers start literally torturing us as punishment for withholding our attention. When I watched that episode for the first time I was horrified but reality is even worse: these people think we're literal criminals who are stealing from them if we don't watch ads.
      - jazzyjackson 5y ago
        Probably because YouTube and Spotify are already peppered with such interruptions “upgrade to premium today to disable these annoying ads”

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

GoodJokes 5y ago
On YouTube tv you can just subscribe to an Olympic sport and it records it all.

petercooper 5y ago

I've previously watched a lot of the Olympics and think it's a great way to bring the world together every now and then. Now this year you have to jump through all these hoops (pun partly intended) and you don't even get commentary for much of it - the IOC are being greedy to a new level.

throw7 5y ago

What I like about NBC Olympic broadcasts is when they cut to shots of Bode Miller's girlfriend at the bottom of the mountain every few seconds. Great stuff.

imglorp 5y ago
"/s" detected. This is what's wrong with most US media: it's insufficient to portray X for its own value, a spackling of drama must be applied on top and that must take priority over X.
- quercusa 5y ago
  And pathos; don't forget the pathos!

jessaustin 5y ago

TFA is not well-informed. Maybe the NBC people should have better marketing, but the Olympics coverage is not terrible. If you have a basic cable or satellite package, you can sign into this app: https://channelstore.roku.com/search/nbc+sports https://channelstore.roku.com/search/nbc+sports Presumably some of the lesser TV appliances also have a similar app. If you don't subscribe to a basic pay TV package, maybe you could do a trial subscription to Hulu or something and sign in with that. With this app, one can watch the entirety of live and recorded events. Many of the live feeds will have "down time" between matches, rounds, etc. There are ads, which are especially annoying for "one-at-a-time" individual events like whitewater canoe slalom. I suspect it would be possible to pi-hole the ads.

D13Fd 5y ago
In my view, if a tech-savvy person putting significant effort in still can't find a way to view the coverage, even if they have a subscription, NBC is doing a poor job.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Searching for an app that lots of people already have installed doesn't seem like "significant effort" to me. If people don't want help or advice with this I don't see the point of this thread.
  - enumjorge 5y ago
    It's not as simple as searching for an app. It's knowing which app to search for, and how to get access to it. When I looked this up over the weekend I came across multiple answers pointing me in the direction NBC, Peacock, Hulu, and YouTube TV. Google "where to watch the olympics", and I see three options just from NBC (NBC, Peacock, and NBC Olympics) followed by list of content farm articles. Even if you manage to get access, the app is organized poorly and makes it difficult to find the content you want.
    - jessaustin 5y ago

sizzzzlerz 5y ago

You must be a youngster. NBC has been fucking up the Olympics broadcasts since they started back in 1988. They've always been overly USA-centric, they refuse to air the broadcasts when the events happen, insisting on time shifting everything, and loading so many commercials into the thing, it is impossible to watch. I pretty much quit watching 3 or 4 olympics ago. Today, as I tune through the channels, I always see they're in commercial when I go through the NBC channels.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Advertising ruins everything.
- baltimore 5y ago
  You've misspelled it. It should be "runs".
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Why can't we have both?
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Both are true. In the sense that advertising guts out any communications medium it touches, and animates the carcass. It's like a zombie virus.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Yes, and I wish they'd leave and stop screwing up all the stuff I care about.
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  But they can’t even get a feed with ads to people. I should have been able to get the NBC “live” Olympics feeds on Peacock or one of the other NBC apps at the broadcast times. Nope. Not even with ads. No dice. Cord-cutters are SOL (if you don’t want to put up an antenna or don’t have local NBC reception). This is how you handle the Olympics if you want the ratings to nosedive.

cflat 5y ago

Find yourself a canadian VPN endpoint and check out the CBC coverage (website or "Gem" app). It's pretty complete and much more accessible.

ape4 5y ago
23 hours a day! And lots of live - of that's the middle of the night in USA/Canada
slantyyz 5y ago
FWIW, Amazon Prime Video in Canada also has the CBC coverage for free. Not quite sure what the value add is though.
giarc 5y ago
We also watch on the CBC Gem Apple TV app. It seems to have everything we want... live events, replay events, "PrimeTime" coverage where they switch between popular events with commentators. We even watched USA vs ROC men's indoor volleyball last night. There were no commentators, just the live feed of the match. It was odd to listen to an empty gym with no commentary but at least we were able to watch.

nyjah 5y ago

The NBC youtube channel does a great job of posting highlights but they also put spoilers in the titles of their videos and it ruins the highlights for me. Looking at the latest video "Katie Ledecky Looks Dominant In 1500m Swim..." Let me know its the 1500m swim event and quit ruining the intrigue before I can click.

fireball_blaze 5y ago

On the modern Olympics: it helps to remember that it is now an advertising event that happens to have sports competitions.

teorema 5y ago
There's so many ethical problems constantly overshadowing the Olympics that it's hard for me to enjoy watching them. I have some excitement for the athletes but no longer make a point of watching them. It's a shame because it's a good idea, but there's a lot if changes that need to happened; coverage is just the tip of the iceberg.
supportlocal4h 5y ago
Not so. You're 20+ years late for that. When you require viewers to create accounts with individual identity, you've gone beyond advertising. Of course you might argue that the modern ad industry has evolved beyond advertising. We have just failed to relabel it.
eplanit 5y ago
I'm so done with the f-ing Olympics. They're just a vast marketing scam that countries and cities buy into -- often acting against the wishes of their own people. The cities that host them see more negative impact than positive; and, frankly, the coverage is boring. After the last fiasco in Brazil, I was hoping it would drive a spike into the heart of the old relic -- maybe the tremendous loss on the investments in Tokyo will help it end . The summer games are the only ones any mass audience really cares about anymore, true?
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  > The summer games are the only ones any mass audience really cares about anymore, true? Not if you're in a wintry country.
  - mousepilot 5y ago
    2018 super g was an amazing contest, I was able to download it after the fact, very enjoyable, from what I read it wasn't very good live.

legitster 5y ago

I don't understand why the Olympics have to be so fast. Build an insane amount of infrastructure, have dozens of events simultaneously all of the time, then ship everyone home. I end up missing just about everything. If I want to catch some of the storylines, I really need them spoon fed to me. If they stretched out the events over a month or two we would get double benefits - we could actually consume more of the events, and they would drastically reduce their need to build venues/villages/etc.

dairylee 5y ago
I believe one of the reasons for this is that in general the sporting calendar is pretty full and this two week period in July/August is always empty.
- giarc 5y ago
  But aren't most sporting calendars built around the Olympics? I'm not talking MLB, NBA etc, but all other sports (athletics, swimming, gymnastics etc) have their World Cups and qualifying etc scheduled specifically to prepare for the Olympics.
  - secabeen 5y ago
    The US pro sports are the tail that wags the dog.
    - giarc 5y ago
      Sure but let's look at a few. NBA - just finished season, many players, even those that played in the playoffs have made the trip to Toyoko. So seems like the NBA could continue to supply players for the Olympics. Golf - they could continue to play at the Olympics since an event could easily be scheduled for a Thursday-Sunday as usual. MLB - no event NHL - winter event that has supplied players, but it is an issue as the Olympics occur right in the middle of their season. NFL - no event Tennis/ATP - super long season normally, could make it a Grand Slam event, or a 1000 event and schedule into season every 4 years. One difficult thing is that doubles teams aren't always from same country. So they would need to mix and therefore affect rankings. I think it could easily be done for most leagues. The issue is money. The NBA/NHL/PGA/ATP have no immediate financial motivation for sending their players but carry risk in that players can get injured. However, if they see the Olympics as a new source of fans (and therefore income) it could be a win-win.

samkelly 5y ago

Just FYI, the pictogram sequence was my favorite part of the opening ceremony.

helen___keller 5y ago

Having watched a bunch over the weekend, my opinion is it feels very 20th century. It's about what you'd expect from a TV broadcast and not much more. Had me wishing that it was broadcast on Twitch or Youtube instead.

sergers 5y ago

In Canada, it's on CBC and tsn networks. CBC comes on free to air cable if u have an antenna, and they have an app for free access even if not a tv subscriber. Plus they have a deal with Amazon Prime, the CBC live streams of events are available though Amazon Prime too.

spookthesunset 5y ago
I wish google would buy the American rights and put it onto YouTube. 4K video for everything. High frame rates. You name it. That or twitch but I don’t think twitch does 4K and it’s client apps aren’t pervasive like YouTube. They don’t even have an Apple TV app.
- ascagnel_ 5y ago
  Twitch does have an Apple TV app, but they support fewer devices than YouTube and they top out at 1080p60 SDR.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  If Google could just buy the Olympics that’d be great. Apparently global revenue is only a few billion dollars, so really it could be organized and funded by a single wealthy patron to let the world watch sports together. Edit: but even if it was just YouTube doing something profitable that would be much better than the current situation with NBC. I guess we’ll check back in 2036.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

NBC's Olympic coverage ... the only reason I've ever found to pay for an IP proxy in the UK so that I could watch the BBC coverage instead. ps. I did try to pay for a UK TV license too but they don't seem to have the concept of someone outside the UK paying for this.

te_chris 5y ago
Oh that’s gone and got cocked up too. Discovery have paid a fortune for the europe-wide individual streaming rights, so BBC can only broadcast two streams at a time. You can only watch the individual sports streams on Eurosport/Discovery plus. This is a kafkaesque mess though - e.g. PS only has Eurosport app, but to sign up and subscribe, you have to go through discovery+, whose credentials can’t log you in to Eurosport; obviously a huge improvement over just having it all on the BBC….
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  But I thought uk left Europe :(
  - nanna 5y ago
    The EU.
  - pdenton 5y ago
    No, they exited the european union. They didn't actually move their entire country outside of europe.
  - scaryclam 5y ago
    EU != Europe. The UK left the political and economic union called the EU, they are still very much part of Europe.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      Huh, I was thinking of Europe as a political entity such that "Exclusive rights to broadcast in Europe" would exclude UK, but TIL thanks

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

The Olympics happen too damned fast. On the very first day after opening we get gold medal results of competitions. NBC assumes that the US crowd wants to see more events than others, so a lot of them never get shown. We just get surprised with announcements of placements, which takes all the suspense out of the games. At the same time, US media is under no obligation to keep results under wraps, which means that they get reported in realtime before we get to see them on TV. So they have that to deal with. But that doesn't excuse the ridiculous amount of zoom calls from D-league commentators and celebrities who waste valuable time that could have been used to show events to instead gush incoherently about "what the Olympics mean to me." Really, nobody cares. And if they did care, we have social media for them to express their opinions.

supportlocal4h 5y ago

Remember the good ol' days when you waited for the results to get published in the newspaper? They're back.

cbsks 5y ago

The Peacock app from NBC is terrible for a different reason. It has a page for each sport, but the first thing it lists is highlight clips named things like "See <country X>'s win in all angles!". Please don't show me spoilers before you give me the opportunity to watch the event!!

goshx 5y ago

The way they cut the transmission live to display commercials, including the live comments and replays, is infuriating. Seeing the same ad over and over and over again while trying to pay attention to the action makes me mad at the company advertising and it's not even their fault.

mstade 5y ago

Discovery is the network broadcasting the Olympics here in Sweden, and they're doing an awful job as well. Especially the app is useless, with very annoying compression artifacts all over feeds with panning camera shots or even medium paced action. Trying to watch the new surfing event with all the white foam and waves was an exercise in patience for sure. But the thing that really drives me up the walls is that the commentator feed on some (maybe all?) events is a second or so too early. The new skateboarding events were completely ruined by hearing the commentators reacting to falls etc, a second or so before you actually see it.

downrightmike 5y ago

Who cares about the olympics? Seriously, who is watching this? Who is the target market?

mattlondon 5y ago
I for one enjoy watching it. A bunch of people I know like to watch it too (and they don't really "do" sports normally). At least in the UK, it gets prime-time billing on one of the major BBC channels.
Taylor_OD 5y ago
Lot's of people. Just because you may not care about sports doesnt mean massive amounts of people around the world don't. Several countries will win their first gold this year. That's a national achievement. Several sports will be included for the first time this year. That is a whole set of people who get to see their favorite hobby included in the games. Many new world records will be set which is an example of technology, humans, and science all working together to achieve things thought impossible before. Many people care about the Olympics for many reasons.
- downrightmike 5y ago
  Worth $20 billion though? with what will end up being completely wasted resources/buildings etc by August? No olympic venue has actually done any where near the amount of good and improvement to a city anywhere near the cost.
  - Taylor_OD 5y ago
    Sure. Could we spend that $20 billion better every four years? Absolutely. Would we? Not a chance.
mullen 5y ago
I'm not a sports person at all but every two years, my wife and I watch tons of Olympics. It's really weird for us since I probably watch 1 hour of sports per year but during the Olympics (Winter and Summer), we will sit down and watch 3 - 5 hours each day. Sports that we have no interest in outside of the Olympics.

ezconnect 5y ago

The question is why is it so hard to watch the Olympics now that you can't watch it live. It should be as easy as going to a URL and pick what you want to watch.

TchoBeer 5y ago
So much this. Fencing was only played once at 5am EST. Finding somewhere to watch recordings is impossible.
- mousepilot 5y ago
  I downloaded the gold metal match from youtube because seemed like an interesting story, the video was very incomplete. It would have been cool to see the entire match.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

Given that the event is in Japan, I'm curious why someone would hire a US-based service to stream it rather than just a Japanese based one. Actually, I'm surprised the Olympics themselves don't have a direct subscription for streaming the entire event where people can sign up and stream it. I'm under the impression that the event is designed for the PHYSICAL audience first, and streaming it is kind of a poorly though out last minute thing.

afavour 5y ago
> Actually, I'm surprised the Olympics themselves don't have a direct subscription for streaming the entire event NBC (and other networks around the world) pay incredible amounts of money for those rights. And the arrangement makes sense for both parties: NBC can use it to boost viewing figures of their own shows in a way the Olympics couldn't/wouldn't. And they have surfaces to advertise coverage that the Olympics doesn't, or would have to go to considerable lengths to get. So it's a value multiplier for the Olympics to sell it rather than handle it themselves. In the words of the (NBC) TV Show 30 Rock: "You can't fight synergy, Lemon. It's bigger than all of us"
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  These things never cease to amaze me. Basically NBC can buy the rights so that people can't just go and buy the stream from the source, but *must* go through this middleman. Image if you could buy the rights to bread, and anyone wanting to sell/buy bread *must* go through you. I honestly can't fathom how we'd decayed into societies that allows this kind of nonsense.
bananapub 5y ago
? because the IOC prints money every four years by selling geo-restricted rights in every country in the world.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I was curious just how much money they printed and found a very nicely put together pdf [0] (page 27 Olympic Broadcasting Revenue Generation) that puts it at 2 or 3 billion USD income for the summer games, and confirms that 72% of Olympic Committee revenue is broadcasting rights. For a global event, getting 50 cents per person seems like a pretty good target, but it’s a shame that a lot of people are unable to watch a lot of the sport since broadcasters pick and choose what to show. I’m sure there’s alternative revenue streams if they got creative but the doc also points out these are long term, stable partnerships where everybody’s happy (except apparently the spectators !) [0] https://stillmed.olympic.org/media/Document%20Library/OlympicOrg/Documents/IOC-Marketing-and-Broadcasting-General-Files/Olympic-Marketing-Fact-File.pdf https://stillmed.olympic.org/media/Document%20Library/Olympi...

jressey 5y ago

I love to talk shit on huge broadcasters but using their app for the olympics has been amazing. I just watched 2 days of replays from their app, all with minimal or no commentary, and all with few commercials (like 1/30 minutes). Not only do you get replays for literally every event, but they don't even spoil them with the final scores or results. Edit: It looks like I failed to mention that cable is required so that's a huge caveat. Also some folks seem to get more commercials than I have.

lake_vincent 5y ago
Agreed - just log into app via cable provider and voila, Olympic paradise.
- tedajax 5y ago
  And if you don't have cable?
  - nrjames 5y ago
    This is the problem I'm experiencing. The best I've found is fuboTV and it's not great. I don't have cable in my house. I'd be willing to pay NBC $100 for access to all of their live and on-demand olympic coverage (what's available through the website, etc.), but that's not even an option.
    - dtparr 5y ago
      Can you not login to the nbc olympics site/app using your fuboTV login and get access to exactly what you're looking for? [0] They also list youtube TV and Sling TV as login options. [0] - Literally asking, as I can see they're available as sign-in TV Providers, but can't test it without a sub.
      - nrjames 5y ago
        It appears to specifically be "Sign in with your Cable Provider." They list the providers and fuboTV is not one of them. EDIT: I was wrong! I used "search all providers" and indeed, fuboTV was listed there, so I signed in with the credentials and it seems to work. Thanks for the nudge!

totalZero 5y ago

If you have cable TV, you can watch everything at nbcolympics.com/schedule so it’s actually quite accessible. I believe you can watch 30 minutes of content without signing in using your cable account. Also, the author is wrong. NBC broadcast the opening ceremonies at 7am [0]. The author must have seen a rebroadcast. [0] https://sports.nbcsports.com/2021/07/23/when-do-the-tokyo-olympics-start-opening-ceremony-schedule-date-time-tv/ https://sports.nbcsports.com/2021/07/23/when-do-the-tokyo-ol...

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Requiring the purchase of an unrelated product for no reason other than padding subscriber numbers for NBC’s benefit qualifies as “making it difficult”.
- totalZero 5y ago
  Several of the tv stations broadcasting the olympics are on cable (eg USA). I understand the desire to watch for free, but cable is certainly not an unrelated product here. If you have a raspberry pi you can probably set up a vpn at a house with cable and watch it that way. For my provider I think they simply match the IP to the ISP (the login was automatic).
  - quickthrowman 5y ago
    Comcast owns NBC and directly benefits from cable subscriptions. NBC also owns all the rights and doesn’t have to put stuff on the cable channels it owns. That’s why people are complaining.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Cable is unrelated if you have access to broadband internet and the digital video signals are being transmitted via the internet. Cable is only related if you own a cable company and want to continue making money for being an unnecessary middleman.
Brendinooo 5y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Between US (NBC), Canada (CBC), and the UK (BBC), Canada’s CBC site seems the best. I’m still disappointed at the number of replays not available. Does anyone know of a country with better coverage to VPN into?

forgot-my-pw 5y ago
Wish there's a premium service directly from the Olympics where you can select the sport and match to want to watch. This doesn't seem to cover even half of the event: https://www.cbc.ca/player/sports/olympics/replays https://www.cbc.ca/player/sports/olympics/replays

zeruch 5y ago

Parent firm Comcast sets the bar for abject trash customer care; given NBC was never well managed for at least the last 15-20 years, its surviving on a back catalog of content, and periodic strangle holds on stuff like the Olympics, which it strip-mines for ad rev.

kuraudo 5y ago

Very interesting; I wonder if the reported viewership dropoff is because the numbers come from cable viewership numbers only, drop in interest in the Olympics in general, or what this article is talking about regarding making it so hard to actually watch. For myself, the only reason I was reminded the Olympics were a thing was because of articles like this.

ManBlanket 5y ago

By far the easiest option is to use your VPN to watch the Olympics on the CBC.

tyingq 5y ago

I'm using Stremium with Locast. Stremium is a cloud-based DVR service that can take in and record other services like Locast. Still pretty new, and there are occasional bugs, but it's working well for me. Stremium is $5/month for 50 hours of DVR storage and another $5/month for Locast to turn off the subscription nags. Works on Web, Android, AndroidTV, FireTV, and Roku.

rel2thr 5y ago

I’ve found that if you sign up for a month of YouTube tv and then use the nbc olympics app, it’s a pretty decent experience. Oh and then you also need peacock to watch some basketball games At first I tried sling but they didn’t have the full family of nbc networks

wscott 5y ago

I have a plex lifetime subscription and a TV tuner in the attic with an antenna that can see local TV stations. My server in the basement runs Plex and can connect to the tuner over ethernet. I told plex to record all Olympic events and to mark the commercials. The result is still a mess, but I have everything NBC broadcasts and a "skip commercials" button pops up for all of the true commercials. I still get all the annoying talking heads and other commercial endorsements that are not commercials, but I can scan forward until the thumbnails match what I want to see. The Olympics every 4 years is one of the main reasons I justify plex.

asciimov 5y ago
Depending on where you are, you are at best getting highlights. I like watching the sports they don't like showing. Nothing worse than NBC claiming they will be showing one sport only to find that it was 30 minutes of talking heads and some gymnast/swimmers life story.

Imnimo 5y ago

Even once you find the thing you want to watch, actually watching it on NBC streaming has been a miserable experience. Moving the mouse anywhere over the entire broadcast window brings up video controls along the bottom of the screen, which take 5+ seconds to fade after you stop moving. These controls are very opaque, and obscure the bottom 10th or so of the video. This tends to block things like athlete names/countries, timers, scores, etc. Ads play, but do not pause the underlying broadcast. They will interrupt commentators mid-sentence, and will return to the broadcast in the middle of actual competition (for example, they might try to sneak an ad in between Badminton points, but the ad is longer than the intra-point break).

xyzzy21 5y ago

Honestly NBC hasn't been good at presenting the Olympics since 1976. That's probably the last time it was worth watching!

Fredvk 5y ago

As a german what is being described here seems crazy, we have to pay taxes which pay for state financed Independent media and it is also required that all important sporting events can not be behind paywalls. You can watch a germany focused broadcast of the olympics all day with minimal ads which only play maybe every hour or you can watch live streams of all events online or trough their app. Most streams also have dedicated commentators that seem reasonably knowledgable about the sports and have quite extensive background knowledge about the athletes and the last years in the sport. It has honestly been a blast watching all kinds of events i would never watch and having someone who is really in to it take you along for the ride

lilibug1 5y ago
Is there any way to watch a replay of German coverage by sport? I've been looking but I can't find anything :(

thehappypm 5y ago

I want to plug locast. They are not huge yet, but basically provide a streaming equivalent of broadcast TV, letting you stream your local broadcast instead of needing an antenna. With how flaky antennas are it's an awesome service, and a non-profit.

ck2 5y ago

Not exactly what they mean but this helps: https://nbcolympics.com/schedule https://nbcolympics.com/schedule

iamevn 5y ago

At least it's all in one place. Watching MLS has a huge pain because games are seemingly randomly split between Fox and ESPN and it's a crapshoot which streaming service we need to use each week to watch our team play I would happily pay someone on the order of $100 to stream a season of MLS at broadcast quality, more if it means less ads. While stadiums were empty they digitally overlaid ads on the empty seats really poorly so that it didn't quite track camera motion and the ball would just disappear behind the ads whenever it was up in the air. Thanks to exclusivity deals and region locking, I can't just choose a different service when the only product available is garbage.

aidenn0 5y ago

I love following taekwondo and I've just given up trying to use NBC's website and just get a VPN to the BBC version. I'll have to see if that works this year or not.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

man so much whinging. This guy is not the target market and clearly NBC only half-cares but is in a position to do so and the eyeballs they get from the "home at 5PM, turn on feed and leave it running til 11PM" is enough for the advertisers and the operation on a nightly. This is likely how it's been for 20 years so this is nothing new.

NearAP 5y ago
How is this 'so much whinging? He clearly explains what his pain is and also adds the fact that maybe NBC did not optimize for him. He further adds that even for the people NBC is optimizing for, he thinks (his own opinion) that those people might not be best served by this approach.

rednerrus 5y ago

If you have youtubetv, you can watch and record everything with the push of a button.

jollybean 5y ago

Convention and event sites are generally very bad. In the age of Google, it's hard to find out when something is happening and to get the most relevant details, especially viewing options. This is a kind of UX experience that transcends an individual entity. I think a lack of standards and means to merge information (i.e. TV schedules for each nation) is a problem. Having really good APIs and data standards across the board would help aka event times, locations, geocoridnates, relevant links, you could practically build you own ux on top of that.

BrUSSELL03 5y ago

Why is NBC not showing the medal ceremonies? It’s like watching a 2 hour movie and it cuts off at 1 hour 50 minutes and you don’t see the best part!!!

drewber 5y ago

To start with nbc is a bunch of leftists. So, to start, it never shows any shooting sports on TV. NBC announced this anti-gun move years ago. So, when there was no streaming, there was no shooting to be found. Second, because they are leftists, they push coverage of more interesting sports to show endless women’s soccer. I know soccer gets more popular in the US each year. But, women’s soccer is not a sport the majority of people want to watch, especially since so many on the team hate the US.