I’ve been very pleased with “my” CBC coverage.
Interesting. way back in time I lived in Michigan and we had CBC on our regular cable package. Their Olympic coverage covered literally nothing but Canadians. 100-meter finals at the same time as a Canadian archer trying to move up into 38th place? No question - They’re showing the plucky Canadian archer.
It feels like we do this thing on coverage like it’s Groundhog Day, every two years when either the Summer or Winter Olympiad is held.
NBC (and before them, ABC) does their coverage style of the Olympics for a reason, and have done so for more than 25 years. It has to do with the huge amounts of money paid for the games, and the need to recoup those costs no matter what. That means you get awful, safe, dullard coverage that typically focuses only on US athletes and spends far too little time covering the actual sports themselves. NBC’s internal metrics tell them that their packages need to ignore sports fans and those traditional means of coverage–which focus on the competition and competitors–and instead do “event coverage” styles.
It’s awful, it’s terrible to watch, and other countries do so much better with the coverage.
But after so many years of this, at this point if you really want to take in the Olympics as an amazing athletic competition, you’re basically the frog complaining to the scorpion in the middle of the stream.
It’s definitely still the case that the CBC will focus on Canadian athletes more than those of other countries, which is to be expected.
But because they don’t get hung up in the private sealed-bid auction style contract wars that American sports networks have, and because interest in Canada has more cultural cachet with the winter games especially, you do get much more thorough coverage and commentary, I think.
I can’t believe NBC is showing an NHL game right now. They could be showing us so many different things that happened yesterday at the Olympics, but no, they paid for NHL rights, so they’re going to show an NHL game. Why is the NHL having games right now anyway? Didn’t they used to take a break during the Winter Olympics so that the players could go over there and compete for their countries?
NHL and team owners decided not to allow any player under contract to play in the Olympic games this time around.
Also: It is 3:15 AM in Pyeongchang right now as I type this. The NHL no doubt has an exclusivity clause in their NBC contract which requires the network to carry an NHL game on Sunday afternoons, and NBC would rather honor that than air replayed footage it can either tuck into later this afternoon or tonight’s prime time.
Those of you with the ability to see it, load up the NBC Sports network. It asks for your cable/satellite provider login, or a login to the site itself (unsure if paid?)
At any rate, you can switch between things going on, or prior recorded content, unlike just watching the lone channel.
There is also a Roku channel for NBC Sports.
A Roku would be convenient right now. The NBC website is terrible at everything except spoiling the previous night’s results before you can watch.
Johnny Weir, the figure skating commentator, dresses like your old, distant, rich great aunt who shows up to your graduation.
I don’t understand Weir’s appeal, he just annoys the shit out of me.
Once I went to see one of those shows they put on after the Olympics are over. So I’m sitting there surrounded by elderly people. When Johnny Weir comes out on ice with “My Way” blasting, the disapproval of me and the old guy sitting next to me was palpable.
At least he’s toned it way down since then. If he just kept doing his thing but reduced the intensity a little more, I wouldn’t mind.
So right now I’m trying to watch the damn figure skating stream, but I’m one hour behind on it. Then when the event ends in real life, the stream cuts out on me. And of course there’s no way to find the replay without first seeing at the top of the page who won. Thanks NBC.
I guess I am the only one who liked Johnny, eh. I loved his presentations, he was like a fragile Candeloro. But I dislike that sports and its silly codes so much, my opinion is irrelevant.
Side by side of the quality of public French TV streams:
and Canadian one:
Not even maxed out, and the artefacts are even worse in motion. And in fullscreen, oh boy.
The Frecnh stream quality has been butchered 5 years ago, because the Interweb sucks in the cataractal eyes of the cacochymic network.
Not pictured: the Frecnh stream also had the audio of the KOR/JPN curling stream mixed in, making for an absolute mayhem of hysterical yells. Which kind of made up for the half-empty Biathlon stadium, I guess.
This actually happened to a few streams the other night for NBC as well. I’m assuming it was something amiss within the control for them, but we were getting things like swishing sounds of snow, with no commentary, or commentary on the wrong event.
Curling is the one sport I’m really missing in NBC’s coverage. It must be on another NBC channel like NBCSN or something, which I don’t get.
The sports that always surprise me every four years are all the various racing sports that turn out to be so much fun to watch. I always forget their names, because they’re not intuitive to remember. There is the biathlon where you go around the track 3 times and shoot twice. There’s the biathlon in which you go around the track 5 times and shoot 4 times. There’s the various lengths of ski racing that all have different names but are essentially all just racing around the track on skis. Then there’s the oval racing of various lengths that the Dutch are so dominant in, those are always surprisingly fun to watch. Then there’s the various short track races that are so fun to watch. Then there’s snowboarding racing that’s crazy fun too. Then there’s Alpine skiing various races against the clock.
I always forget how much I love watching people race against the clock. Before video games I used to find these so boring. But post-video games, I love watching people race against the clock.
Unfortunately, with NBC if you don’t have the sports app, you need to expand a little outside of the direct TV broadcast to get everything.
Use this:
And specific to @abidingdude , here is an OAR game:
OAR has another game today I believe.
I’m the opposite. I have a hard time enjoying races unless there’s some interaction between the competitors, like in short track. Maybe if I knew the sports better and could actually tell why one person is going faster than another I would like it more. I watched the giant slalom and I would have absolutely no idea who won if they didn’t tell me.
I was able to watch a bunch of curling last night (late) live on NBC’s Roku app. They had several matches to pick from even.
VPN to CBC.ca and there is more curling than you could ever want to watch