NBC did a great job, Bob Costas and Jim Lampley were great and so were Ato Boldin and Tom Hammond doing Track and Field, Al Trautwig, Elfi Schleigel,and Tim Daggett doing Gymnastics did a good job. NBC gets an A plus.
My beef has never been with the individual commentators, as I find NBC's sports commentary to be just fine. My problem with NBC's coverage is that it is horribly disorganized.
Almost nothing was shown live, and even the coverage that they claimed was live was three hours delayed on the west coast. Numerous events were shown only piecemeal, such as volleyball matches joined in the middle of the third set, for example. They overemphasize a small percentage of sports and virtually ignore the rest.
They spend an inordinate amount of time doing boring human interest stories that nobody cares about. They claimed to be devoting so many channels to Olympic coverage and yet most of their channels spent only a few hours a day on Olympic coverage. There were even several times when events were being competed live and yet none of NBC's five basic cable channels were showing any Olympics at all.
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Theoden_of_ODU
16 years ago
However, compared to years past, the human interest stories were not as common, or pervasive as they had once been.
If on a tape delay, they would start the event, cut away before the "action" began, and do a 4-8 minute special interest story and then get back to the actual event.
I think a huge part of the problem is the assumption that people will not tune into the Olympics at specific times during the day - or that crap programming like "Dr. Phil" will pull in more viewers than an hour of Olympics at 2:00pm on a Tuesday.
I appreciated the "NBC Olympic Soccer" and "NBC Olympic Basketball" commercial-free channels, but I would have preferred an entirely devoted channel to the ENTIRE Olympics, 24 hours a day (or close to it).
If they have the 2012 Olympics, they need to not spread their programming across all the channels. Avoid using Oxygen - it wasn't used enough to being with and only a small portion of the viewing audience would ever check to find Olympic coverage on that network.
Focus on using most of USA's programming slots for DEVOTED Olympic coverage, close to 24 hours a day. Give the NBC affiliates the time for local news, and provide them with coverage for nearly 24 hours of the day. If the local affiliates decide to not show Olympics between Noon and 8pm, it would be on their heads - not corporate ("now back to Olympic coverage..." sort of deal). It's only two weeks of the year, I think people can go without Monk and re-runs of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Criminal Intent.
No West Coast tape delay.
Show more than Swimming during one programming block in the evenings. With the tape delay they could have easily mixed things up more than they did.
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