With NBC providing thousands of hours of Olympic coverage with broadcast, cable and online viewing available there is an overwhelming amount of viewing available. Now I hate watching the 45 second highlight clips intermixed with 45 minute human interest stories that make the prime-time Olympic magazine show. I want to sit down and watch some event to see what it is, or how it works and become an armchair judge (or in the case of Laser sailing… maybe learn something).
So I’m VERY disappointed in the NBC broadcast listings on their website. At first glance it seems like a lot of thought went into organizing the event and broadcast information, but extracting useful information from the NBC broadcast megaplex is nearly impossible.
The front page shows two charts. Time of day is across the top of both. The first chart has rows organized by channel and the second chart has rows organized by event. So far so good. Above the chart is a selector that allows you to pick which day of competition you want to view. Nice, right? Where things start to break down are the three pull down menus for filtering the list. You can filter “By Time”, “By Sport” or “By TV Channel”. But NOT MORE THAN ONE. Even worse, your filter/search ONLY returns results for the currently selected day. Huh?
So if you want to find out when fencing will be on, you have to select “Fencing” from the “By Sport” menu, then individually click EACH DAY OF COMPETITION ONE AT A TIME. Why???
The chart itself is populated with white or grey boxes. If the boxes are grey, then an event is occurring at that time. You have to hover over it to see what the specific event is. Most of the events, of course, will not be featured on any actual TV channel but are listed as “Online”… whatever that means. A search for “online viewing FAQ” revealed nothing useful, but after some clicking I managed to find the NBCOlympics.com Video FAQ. Strange that this was not found by the search*. The FAQ reveals that video will be available live AND until the end of the year, so you won’t have to stay up until 1:45AM to see your favorite event (bonus!). Of course since Micro$oft and NBC are bedfellows, you’ll need the new M$ $ilverLight 2 Beta (Yes! BETA!) for full capability. Otherwise IE and M$ Media Player will theoretically work. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m guessing that you will have to watch the videos online (streaming), so it will be interesting to see how much fast-forward/skip capability will be present. I fear that we will be forced to watch commercials, lame Bob Costas commentary , Olympic theme music and replays (”Kerri Strug vaults!“) that somehow will be inserted into video 24 hours a day.
We shall see.
