Ok, I'm breaking away from the game industry for a moment to talk about the Olympics. They have been awesome so far and anyone not tuning in, is missing some great events. But the Olympics have been dulled by my experience with NBC.
I’ve been watching the Olympics exclusively online, since I don’t have cable, and let me tell you, it’s been lackluster. It began last Friday when NBC decided to pass up the opportunity to live-stream the opening ceremony. To ensure that none of the American audience would get to see it, they were extremely aggressive in shutting down any third party site that attempted to stream it in the US. So by the time the real event was over NBC was showing their taped version on prime time, in order to maximize their ad revenue.
Every other country in the world had access to the event live, and we were stuck watching a tape…
All of the events, some 300 of them are being live streamed by NBC to be watched, and while that is extraordinary, they promised this prematurely. For anyone else watching the events online they are familiar with the almost consistent freeze frames, slow downs, flash player crashes or even having their browser hang. Yes I understand that there are a lot of people watching these streams, but NBC had four years to prepare for this event. How did they not get ready for this worst case scenario?
Certain streams were simply absent from being online. The great race between Phelps and Lotche just didn’t air, I read about it as it happened on Twitter… Other comments/complaints I have heard is that the NBC news desk has been reporting about the Olympics before the taped coverage has even played, spoiling the event for viewers.
In our age of social media and instant communication how does a single cooperation own exclusive rights to a global event? I am unsatisfied by NBC’s attempt at coverage and would gladly turn, even pay someone else to do it, but that is simply not an option. Looks like I might be on the hunt for a proxy in London, that might give me at least a constant feed of what’s going on.
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