Olympics 2021 TV

[PGage]

Overall I am digging the way these Olympics are being presented. Whenever I am tempted to complain about something, I tell myself to STF up, as my younger self remembers having no choice but to watch partial and very incomplete US-centric highlights with Jim McKay’s at times jingoistic commentary.

I’m not sure if it is any more accessible than 2016 or 18, or if I just have gotten more comfortable accessing the options online. I have watched a hell of a lot of Olympics this weekend, and still had time to do my walking with friends and hang with wife and son, because I can watch anything, any time. I love that I can watch on my own schedule, and select what I want to see.

What is really working for me this time is integrating what I think of as three levels of access: 1) Streaming events, 2) NBC Cable family event coverage, 3) NBC prime time coverage. For an event like archery, which I am strangely into fir no good reason, I have been able to not miss an arrow by watching online. My son is into the Table Tennis, and can follow matches with nations that don’t make it on TV. But NBC has done a decent job televising events like the cycling road races (though I have  some criticisms) and Triathlons, and for the most part I watch team competitions like indoor Volleyball, Softball and Basketball on Cable TV. I had thought I would skip the Primetime show, but it turns out that if I record it, I can use it to keep up on events I barely care about (e.g. swimming, which I am glad to skip all preliminaries, and NBC has nicely arranged to have many of the key medal events held in the morning in Tokyo, which makes the live I. Primetime here. I can fast forward through the events I don’t care about at all (e.g. skateboarding, beach volleyball).

I was particularly pleased yesterday with how I was able to structure my Gymnastics. I watched a couple of rotations online that did not include the US team. I was going to watch the rotation with the US team, but did not have time, which of course was fine, since NBC’s Primetime coverage was pretty much just of the US team, and watching that after my deeper dive into the other teams was helpful. I was sorry to miss the poor Netherlands team, which competed along with the Americans, but I think was invisible on NBC, but I did see most of the Russian, Chinese, British and Japanese athletes. 

Even from a US-centric POV, over focusing on The US team is a counterproductive choice for NBC. While there were a lot of great performances from other countries, seeing a broader range of participants only serves to underline how great the US team is, even on a night when they were not at their best.

I really enjoy the more international feel of the internet, non NBC coverage, and it is a great relief from the loud, in your face style if US TV. What are we seeing there, it’s not quite BBC, but seems to be British. Sometimes for my American ears they are a little too reserved, and I found to my surprise that I missed the somewhat obnoxious woman who does the NBC diving commentary, and switched over to her at one point.

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[danieland...@gmail.com]

Our NBC station is all Olympics all the time, outside of Today, the news, and Kelly and Ryan and Dr Oz.(the latter two shows air when there's nothing going on in Tokyo.)

[Tom Wolper]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 10:37 AM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Overall I am digging the way these Olympics are being presented. Whenever I am tempted to complain about something, I tell myself to STF up, as my younger self remembers having no choice but to watch partial and very incomplete US-centric highlights with Jim McKay’s at times jingoistic commentary.

My observations having spent much less time than you watching the games:

First and most welcome is that it finally got through up and down the Olympics and media institutions is to treat and talk about female athletes as athletes. I saw an AP story about how the camera people shooting the video pool footage are instructed not to sexualize their shots of female athletes. One thing I found unwatchable in the past was showcasing gymnasts and synchronized swimmers as performers or princesses rather than athletes who had to give up normal lives in order to train for these events. I sincerely hope that the days of calling an American women's gymnastics champ America's Sweetheart are over unless they also call an American men's decathlon champ that, too.

There was a truism from the Roone Arledge days of Olympic coverage that women don't watch sports so the way to get them immersed in the Olympics is to turn athletes' personal stories into soap operas for Up Close and Personal segments. There still seem to be "get to know the athlete" segments but they have been moved into the background. Our collective sports experience, certainly of the last decade, is that women like and watch sports and don't need to be talked down to. NBC also seems to have added more female commentators to mens' sports.

I still don't have cable but I saw the NBC Olympics site will give me a 30 minute window to watch highlights. I also subscribe to the NBC Sports YouTube page and they are putting up tons of highlights and not US-centric ones. I can find plenty to watch without having to find a VPN or bothering with pirated streams.

As for turning away from being US-centric, it seems that broadcast sports are going that way and it's not killing them in the ratings. ESPN and ABC just had the delayed Euro 2020 competition. FOX and its FS channels had the Copa America (South American national team competition) and now they have the CONCACAF Gold Cup (North America and the Caribbean national team competition). The US team is only playing in the last competition. The announcers of games the US is not in do not constantly make references to the US team so maybe the younger sports watching public has a more balanced international world view.

[Kevin M.]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 11:28 AM Tom Wolper <two...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 10:37 AM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Overall I am digging the way these Olympics are being presented. Whenever I am tempted to complain about something, I tell myself to STF up, as my younger self remembers having no choice but to watch partial and very incomplete US-centric highlights with Jim McKay’s at times jingoistic commentary.

My observations having spent much less time than you watching the games:

First and most welcome is that it finally got through up and down the Olympics and media institutions is to treat and talk about female athletes as athletes. I saw an AP story about how the camera people shooting the video pool footage are instructed not to sexualize their shots of female athletes. One thing I found unwatchable in the past was showcasing gymnasts and synchronized swimmers as performers or princesses rather than athletes who had to give up normal lives in order to train for these events. I sincerely hope that the days of calling an American women's gymnastics champ America's Sweetheart are over unless they also call an American men's decathlon champ that, too.

For what it is worth, my late mother definitely considered Olympian Greg Louganis to be America’s Sweetheart, but your point is well taken. 

There was a truism from the Roone Arledge days of Olympic coverage that women don't watch sports so the way to get them immersed in the Olympics is to turn athletes' personal stories into soap operas for Up Close and Personal segments. There still seem to be "get to know the athlete" segments but they have been moved into the background. Our collective sports experience, certainly of the last decade, is that women like and watch sports and don't need to be talked down to. NBC also seems to have added more female commentators to mens' sports.

I still don't have cable but I saw the NBC Olympics site will give me a 30 minute window to watch highlights. I also subscribe to the NBC Sports YouTube page and they are putting up tons of highlights and not US-centric ones. I can find plenty to watch without having to find a VPN or bothering with pirated streams.

As for turning away from being US-centric, it seems that broadcast sports are going that way and it's not killing them in the ratings. ESPN and ABC just had the delayed Euro 2020 competition. FOX and its FS channels had the Copa America (South American national team competition) and now they have the CONCACAF Gold Cup (North America and the Caribbean national team competition). The US team is only playing in the last competition. The announcers of games the US is not in do not constantly make references to the US team so maybe the younger sports watching public has a more balanced international world view.

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[PGage]

Totally agree about how they present women athletes, both doing a much better job, and long overdue. I think they have said this was the first year where there are the same number of men and women participating, and there are more returning US women medal winners than men. The two highest profile US Olympians are women (Biles and swimmer Ledecky [sp?]). 

There are still those bikinis for the beach volleyball women, but one has to think this is the last year for that, as it is increasingly absurd. There has been a lot of attention on social media about the Norwegian Beach Handball team (non-Olympic) who were recently fined for wearing shirts instead of bikini bottoms.

I watched both the Euro and South American soccer tournaments recently, and did notice how well they were covered, which is a great sign. NBC’s Primetime coverage of both Gymnastics and Swimming (and probably a few other events) has not quite caught up with this. The US did not do as well in the pool as they had hoped last night and the tone in the broadcast booth was like they were covering a funeral.

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[John Edwards]

The ridiculous women's volleyball uniforms come from the international volleyball federation (FIVB). They brought that rule in about 20-25 years ago. In beach, that means bikini bottoms, in indoor volleyball the women wear booty shorts, while the men wear regular shorts. 

So it wasn't necessarily an NBC decision; although it did come from the federation in an attempt to make women's volleyball more marketable. It was ham-handed then, and I agree with you that hopefully this is the last Olympics for this.

John

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John Edwards
"You can insure against the weather, but you can't insure against incompetence, can you?" - Phil Tufnell

[M-D November]

Along similar lines, the German women’s gymnastics team is competing in unitards which include coverage for arms & legs, rather than the “traditional” bikini cut leotard, seeking parity with the male gymnasts, who wear regular shorts during floorex and long pants on other apparatus. Biles has been quoted as saying, essentially, she prefers the leo because it makes her legs look longer, but she supports what the German team is doing.

[Adam Bowie]

The big news here in the UK is that this is the first Olympics in recent times where the BBC has had to cede much of its coverage to Discovery - who own the pan-European Eurosport channel(s). Since the London games in 2012, the BBC has had commercial-free access to every minute of games footage. In 2012 there were something like 2,500 hours of coverage - much of it available via iPlayer (widely available here on Smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV sticks and everything else). But a few years ago, the IOC sold pan-European coverage to Discovery - minimising what local networks can show.

This wasn't exactly secret - if you're someone like me who follows the industry, you'd have known. But the wider public didn't know, and now have found that their viewing options are much more limited than they had been previously.

It's worth noting that many European countries, including the UK, have a number of "Listed Events" - sports events that are legally required to be shown on free-to-air TV, on channels that are available to at least 95% of the population. That includes events like the World Cup. The BBC actually *had* full rights to the 2018 Winter Games and 2020 Summer Games, but traded some of them for continued free-to-air rights for 2022 and 2024 Games. 

By all accounts, the BBC managed to do a decent deal with Discovery to get 350 hours of coverage. The IOC only mandates that Discovery has to sub-licence 200 hours to local broadcasters.

Anyway, all of this means that viewers used to spending hours just watching rowing/table-tennis/whatever-their-passion, now have a choice of just two sports at any given time, with the BBC forced to cut around as needed. That means we mostly follow British medal hopes, but it also means that it's hard to stay with a single event if there's a Brit doing well elsewhere.

In the meantime, Eurosport, which is a pay channel and not available in most homes, has spun up 7 additional channels on top of the 2 it normally has, but so far its coverage has been patchy. They're doing the same job in multiple European languages, and I'm not sure they have the production staff to cope. Some of those channels at times have been completely silent, and coverage with zero commentary at all is quite regular (Surprising because I believe that the IOC makes available an English language S"world feed" that broadcasters can use if they don't have their own people to call the sport. Even NBC uses this audio for some minority interest sports). 

So if you're searching for a country to point your VPN at, you might be better off looking at Canada rather than the UK!

What really baffles me about all this is how little promotion Discovery/Eurosport has done to promote their big Olympic offering. They paid a massive amount for the rights (there wasn't actually an auction, but the $1.5bn deal blew all the European public broadcasters out of the water), but you'd be hard pushed to see advertising. They've included the Olympics in their Discovery+ offering, but I'm not 100% sure that people who want to watch shark documentaries and reality shows about lumberjacks are a complete natural fit for sports coverage even if the Olympics do engage non-sports fans.

Adam

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[PGage]

Adam, do you think it is this Discovery coverage that NBCOLYMPICS.COM is streaming? The commentators all seem to have some sort of British accent (my ear is not good enough to rule out an occasional Australian or South African, and there was at least one Irish accent, though not sure which one).

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[Adam Bowie]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 4:12 PM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Adam, do you think it is this Discovery coverage that NBCOLYMPICS.COM is streaming? The commentators all seem to have some sort of British accent (my ear is not good enough to rule out an occasional Australian or South African, and there was at least one Irish accent, though not sure which one).

No - I think that mix of accents, which will include people from multiple English-speaking countries, is being provided by Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS). They're the company that provides everyone with the basic feeds of the sport. Obviously larger broadcasters can supplement those feeds with their own camera positions, close-ups of coaches etc. But the idea is that if you buy coverage, you get a basic minimum.

One part of that offer is what in the trade is usually called a "World Feed" commentary team. And I think that the majority of sports get these commentators. When someone hear earlier this year posted the big NBC press release about who was calling what, that release noted that there would be some "World Feed" commentary teams in place. Tell-tale signs are neutrality about favoured nations (although they may cover English-speaking countries' competitors a little more), and no reference to the network they're being carried on. 

I watched the mountain bike races and there was a South African man and a Australian woman doing the coverage. In the UK, both Eurosport and the BBC used that World Feed commentary as neither really had their own experts. I also saw some of the Women's Triathlon earlier on Eurosport and that too sounded like a World Feed to me (Irish man/Australian woman, I think).

One key thing to note is that the World Feed commentators from OBS are often at the venues - which is much rarer this year. And even in normal years, a lot of commentary comes from booths in the massive media centre, rather than actually in booths at the events themselves. I'm not sure how many people NBC have in Tokyo, but many events on the BBC and Eurosport are being called from the UK/France (Eurosport's HQ is in Paris) rather than in Japan. That's pretty unusual. Obviously there are still reporters on the ground for interviews/features. But far fewer.

If you want to learn lots of technical detail about how OBS operates, there's a lot here: https://www.sportsvideo.org/2021/07/27/live-from-tokyo-olympics-obs-technical-area-offers-inside-look-at-how-the-games-come-together/

It's all being made in 4K, although in the UK nobody is showing it that way. The audio is captured 5.1.4. The 5.1 is regular Surround Sound and the .4 is for "ceiling" speakers - think Dolby Atmos without the branding. Apparently there are 16 "channels" of sport being produced from Tokyo. So that's the maximum number of simultaneous feeds you could be watching!

Adam

[Doug Eastick]

regardings Adam's elaboration on feeds and commentators locations..... CBC's main "hosts" for broadcasts are all located in Toronto this year.   Many commentators are as well -- I presume Swimming as well because we've never seen Byron McDonald on camera this week.  I'll see if I can find the article I read it in.    I find that the hosts are carefully choosing words to not specifically state they are not in Tokyo.

FYI.... while USA loves gymnastics in primetime, the CBC has 2 hrs of swimming each evening -- every event from 930pm to ~11pm.

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[PGage]

Thanks Adam! This was really helpful. I thought the lack of national boosterism was just British reserve and good manners, but I should have know that never stopped the British Empire from looking after its own interests. 

Definitely some of the NBC commentators are at home in the US, but there are some on site. It seemed to me that the main commentators for the cycling road races (which I watched on USA tv I think) were not anywhere near the course; (they did have an on site reporter near the finish line), to which I attribute their failure to describe/comment on an interesting feature of the end of the women’s race. Also, in a newsworthy development in the gymnastics competition today (I got up early this morning to watch it near- live on the website) the commentators seemed to not be on site, and getting information fed to them piecemeal. While the NBC Gymnastics crew seems to be on site, even though everything they show is like 12 hours old on tape.

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[Kevin M.]

And the ratings are in

https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/nbcuniversal-tokyo-olympics-make-goods-advertising-1235028563/

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[danieland...@gmail.com]

Has the swimming always been in the morning to accommodate NBC? In 2008, Dick Ebersol, the(then) chairman of NBC Sports, had secured the support of the International Olympic Committee for the critical move of the finals of the key television sports of swimming and gymnastics to morning hours in China so they could be shown live in prime time in the United States. So whoever succeed him has done the same thing with swimming, since it brings in more viewers.

[Adam Bowie]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 4:23 PM danieland...@gmail.com <danieland...@gmail.com> wrote:

Has the swimming always been in the morning to accommodate NBC? In 2008, Dick Ebersol, the(then) chairman of NBC Sports, had secured the support of the International Olympic Committee for the critical move of the finals of the key television sports of swimming and gymnastics to morning hours in China so they could be shown live in prime time in the United States. So whoever succeed him has done the same thing with swimming, since it brings in more viewers.

It depends where the Olympics are being held. 

2004 Athens - evening finals local time (afternoon EST)

2008 Beijing - finals moved to the morning at the behest of NBC

2012 London - evening finals local time (afternoon EST)

2016 Rio - night session starting at 2200 local at behest of NBC to put them into US primetime

2020/1 Tokyo - morning sessions for finals at behest of NBC

So yes, when the swimming finals have been moved, it's NBC that got them to move. European Olympics don't work for that however since you'd have to start sessions at about 0100/0200 local time to hit US primetime!

[PGage]

As I have been arguing elsewhere, the ratings problems are not due to desexualizing women athletes, and mostly to the same factors that have led to the accelerated ratings declines for all broadcast television events. My 23 year old son tells me most of his friends prefer to simply find out who won on Twitter and watch highlights on YouTube.

The time zone problems, and relative reduction in amount of live prime time events is also a factor. Related to this though is that, while USA is doing well in the Medal count, they have not been doing as well as advertised on the two big ticket TV events for the first week: Gymnastics and Swimming. Instead of a week celebrating US Women and Simone Biles, NBC had to tell the story of the Russians winning Gold in men’s and women’s, and the somewhat complex, cryptic and controversial tale of what happened to Biles.  Actually think NBC has done a better than expected job with this, but that does not put asses in the seats. USA has won gold in the pool, but there have also been plenty of silver and bronze, and even some high profile Americans finishing way off the podium. 

I don’t believe too many people really are influenced to watch 4 hours of Olympics in Primetime just to see female athletes in short outfits. But we know millions of Americans do base watching decisions on patriotic porn, and if they don’t get a good enough fix of “America Roolz, everyone else Sux” they tend to click off. That is part of what is happening. 

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[John Edwards]

It dates back to 1988 in Seoul, when the track finals were shifted to the morning local time, to be in US Eastern prime time. 

John 

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[PGage]

I am up early (3:00 am PT) to watch the Men’s 100 M semifinals and finals live. The Women’s 100 M was on live in Primetime last night, but I guess the men’s did not work out to have in the morning in Tokyo. I’m not complaining about that.

While I am happy there is a way to watch this and every Olympic event live on nbcsports.com, using what per Adam I am now is the OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services) feed, and have been using this a lot for both live and delayed viewing, I am wondering why NBC does not just air its own coverage live, and then replay it for Primetime?

It seems like the Primetime coverage of events like gymnastics and Track, even when taped from earlier in the day, is “Live to tape”, and the NBC talent fir these events is on site in Tokyo and doing their jobs as the event takes place. Or do they go back and edit and even sweeten or re-do parts?

I didn’t care that much fir the gymnastics, but I like the NBC crew fir Track, and am missing them.

[PGage]

Now that it’s over, I will rewatch tonight (if I am awake) to see how NBC did with it, but I so enjoyed watching the OBS coverage of what turned out to be an extraordinary track and field night at the Olympics, and doubt I would have liked NBC any more.

[Kevin M.]

On Sun, Aug 1, 2021 at 3:49 AM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am up early (3:00 am PT) to watch the Men’s 100 M semifinals and finals live. The Women’s 100 M was on live in Primetime last night, but I guess the men’s did not work out to have in the morning in Tokyo. I’m not complaining about that.

While I am happy there is a way to watch this and every Olympic event live on nbcsports.com, using what per Adam I am now is the OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services) feed, and have been using this a lot for both live and delayed viewing, I am wondering why NBC does not just air its own coverage live, and then replay it for Primetime?

Probably the sane reason it took years for them to stream NBC Sports coverage of Le Tour De France instead of coverage commentated by one slightly drunk British guy in a phone booth. These Olympics were organized before streaming was as common, and advertising deals were arranged sometimes years in advance. Advertisers want to advertise on exclusive first run coverage, not a rerun.  

It seems like the Primetime coverage of events like gymnastics and Track, even when taped from earlier in the day, is “Live to tape”, and the NBC talent fir these events is on site in Tokyo and doing their jobs as the event takes place. Or do they go back and edit and even sweeten or re-do parts?

I didn’t care that much fir the gymnastics, but I like the NBC crew fir Track, and am missing them.

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Adam Bowie]

This all sounds curious. So am I correct in assuming that when some events that don't fall into US primetime go out live - e.g. athletics in the middle of the night PST - the commentary feed you're getting is the OBS world feed, and not with the NBC team? It's only when those same events get packaged for perhaps Today or evening primetime that the NBC talent is added to the mix?

I get that NBC can package things up a bit more smoothly, dropping in interviews and features, removing heats that don't have US competitors involved, and generally tightening things up for later in the day. But why wouldn't you use the same commentary teams throughout?

In Europe we're sort of in the same boat, with much live action taking place overnight. I wake up each morning to a phone full of alerts (aka "spoilers") about which medals were won overnight during Tokyo-daytime. But if I do choose to stay up late and watching live, the same BBC commentators are calling the action that I'll see later on. The only time OBS commentary feeds are used is if the BBC is including their own commentators at all (e.g. Mountain biking). Certainly, by the time we get to an evening package, which is all highlights given the timezone differences, everything is packaged much more tightly, and they've collected a bunch of post-event interviews, but the fundamentals are the same as if I had been watching at 4am.

As long as nobody is still "re-ordering" things to create "better" narratives as I know has been done in the past... :-)

Adam

[Doug Eastick]

Fyi... The CBC web on-demand viewing of events (i.e. select "archery"), and probably even live, is the OBS feed .  I have not watched enough to completely say it's true.

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[Adam Bowie]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 1:29 PM Doug Eastick <eas...@mcd.on.ca> wrote:

Fyi... The CBC web on-demand viewing of events (i.e. select "archery"), and probably even live, is the OBS feed .  I have not watched enough to completely say it's true.

I guess it makes life easy to use the OBS audio for everything streaming, but it seems an old way of thinking - that streaming is something only a small amount of the audience is doing. 

Not that I'd expect CBC to doing their own archery commentary - unless archery is especially massive in Canada :-)

I suppose if in the primetime shows, hosts are constantly throwing to one another, then doing things separately makes sense. ie. have a different team doing solid athletics for four hours compared to the main team who after the 100m then say, "...And now lets join John  and Pam at the basketball..." 

[Adam Bowie]

This piece by an Aussie journalist who works in America amused me. Spoiler: He's not an NBC super-fan - https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/02/nbc-olympic-coverage-peacock-replays-primetime

[Tom Wolper]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 9:41 AM Adam Bowie <ad...@adambowie.co.uk> wrote:

This piece by an Aussie journalist who works in America amused me. Spoiler: He's not an NBC super-fan - https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/02/nbc-olympic-coverage-peacock-replays-primetime

A lot of his criticisms are the same ones we've had on this list going back to our beginning. NBC inherited its primetime Olympic coverage from ABC's Roone Arledge playbook and they have trained US viewers to want and appreciate that style of coverage. The quick cuts from live events to replays and incoherent coverage, while annoying to him, are exciting to US viewers who aren't invested in the sports or know how other countries cover the games. A lot of the annoying things like sponsor mentions and meaningless interviews are ambient to the average viewer, who doesn't see them as annoying at all.

Right now I have two minor gripes about the coverage: every announcing team in any sport gets a media packet from the team, league, federation, etc. In it are some notes about players or athletes. Announcers read the notes as part of their prep and good ones use them when there's a lull in the action or they want to draw attention to a certain player. Below average announcers use them in a way that reminds you that the announcer doesn't have insight to a player based on research or conversations, but they're just reading notes from a media packet. There's way too much of this note reading in NBC coverage. Usually it comes when the camera is showing competitors one by one at the pool's starting platform or runners at the blocks. The announcer will say the competitor's name and home country and then add a note that seems to come out of nowhere.

My other gripe, which comes from news coverage more than NBC, is hearing/seeing every day about shockers and upsets. In an elite competition anybody can win, especially with the tight margins at the Olympics, and world champions or previous gold medal winners are not entitled to win their events. It makes for fun TV to see someone unexpected win and exhilarating to watch their surprise, but when I look at sports headlines in the early morning and it's full of "shockers," it bugs me.

[Adam Bowie]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 3:36 PM Tom Wolper <two...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 9:41 AM Adam Bowie <ad...@adambowie.co.uk> wrote:

This piece by an Aussie journalist who works in America amused me. Spoiler: He's not an NBC super-fan - https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/02/nbc-olympic-coverage-peacock-replays-primetime

A lot of his criticisms are the same ones we've had on this list going back to our beginning. NBC inherited its primetime Olympic coverage from ABC's Roone Arledge playbook and they have trained US viewers to want and appreciate that style of coverage. The quick cuts from live events to replays and incoherent coverage, while annoying to him, are exciting to US viewers who aren't invested in the sports or know how other countries cover the games. A lot of the annoying things like sponsor mentions and meaningless interviews are ambient to the average viewer, who doesn't see them as annoying at all.

I know there really wasn't anything new there. But I did think it was well written, and I did chuckle out loud a few times :-)

To be honest, I'm sure American viewers would find things annoying about British or Australian coverage of the games too.

 

Right now I have two minor gripes about the coverage: every announcing team in any sport gets a media packet from the team, league, federation, etc. In it are some notes about players or athletes. Announcers read the notes as part of their prep and good ones use them when there's a lull in the action or they want to draw attention to a certain player. Below average announcers use them in a way that reminds you that the announcer doesn't have insight to a player based on research or conversations, but they're just reading notes from a media packet. There's way too much of this note reading in NBC coverage. Usually it comes when the camera is showing competitors one by one at the pool's starting platform or runners at the blocks. The announcer will say the competitor's name and home country and then add a note that seems to come out of nowhere.

Absolutely. You can always tell who has really done their homework and *knows* the sport fully, and who is basically winging it. I know a cycling commentator who spends hours and hours doing his prep on the route, the riders and everything else. Yes - the event organisers provide background information, but this is just vanilla. You need to have watched them in previous events so you can put their performances into perspective. Dig into their stats. Keep an eye on their social media. All that kind of thing. Certainly keep copious notes so that you can break out relevant facts when you need to - not everything has to be memorised. But also, don't use those facts when you don't need them. 

Badly produced sports/events sometimes have captions come up with useless information about competitors telling viewers that a competitor's favourite movie is Harry Potter and their favourite artist is Ed Sheeran. All that does is give you a rough idea of how old they probably are...

 

My other gripe, which comes from news coverage more than NBC, is hearing/seeing every day about shockers and upsets. In an elite competition anybody can win, especially with the tight margins at the Olympics, and world champions or previous gold medal winners are not entitled to win their events. It makes for fun TV to see someone unexpected win and exhilarating to watch their surprise, but when I look at sports headlines in the early morning and it's full of "shockers," it bugs me.

I have a particular allergy to anyone said to have "crashed out". If the #1 in the world is beaten in the opening round by the #297, then sure, use that term. But the #10 beating the #2 in the semi-finals is not an incredible upset. That sort of thing does - and should - happen. Four years - or five even - is an eternity for some sports where athletes' peaks are short lived. For them it's a bigger surprise if the same competitor even manages two straight Olympics, never mind winning gold at multiple games. 

Part of the joy of sport is that it's unscripted. 

But that probably doesn't help if you're busily junking 10 feature pieces you've already made and had planned to sprinkle across your coverage for the next week, when a favoured athlete fails early...

[PGage]

I have been without power for most of the previous two days (I live in a rural area, and my electricity comes from one of the worst power companies in the US), so I was doubly glad I got up early Saturday to watch the T&F live, as I was only able to watch the NBC primetime coverage from Saturday night this (Monday) morning. And yes, what we see online at NBCSPORTS.com of the track events live is OBS, even when it will be an anchor of NBC’s primetime coverage with their commentators and production.

In this case, while I do really like the NBC T&F commentators, the OBS coverage of the event was 100X better. NBC slices and dices it in so many ways, combining tape of events that happened more than 12 hours earlier with live coverage, often without even noting the difference for viewers, and of course also switching to completely different sports, that they lost all sense of the electricity of what was happening that night in the stadium. I could describe a number of examples, but one stands out:

The winning of the Mes’s 100 Meters was an Italian (a multiracial guy born in Texas, but who grew up in Italy with his Italian mother). It was pretty much a shocker that he won. Yards after crossing the finish line, a white dude runs up and gives him a passionate, full body hug lasting several seconds. NBC viewers would have had no idea what was going on, and their commentators did not even comment on it. Later, NBC had Mike Tirico come on and explain, and then show the contextual footage, but it lost a lot in the translation.

That enthusiastic hugger was the Italian Gianmarco Tammberi who had just minutes before won a gold medal in the High Jump, in very dramatic fashion, as he tied with a guy from Qatar, and they had the option to do a jump off, but agreed to both take the Gold, which triggered passionate celebration and hugging on both sides. This guy hung around to watch his teammate run the 100M, and when he won what is the trademark even of the Track and Field meet, and maybe even of the Olympics, he went nuts. It was a genuinely thrilling, spontaneous moment, the kind that makes the Olympics great, the kind of moment that NBC is continually trying to manufacture, and because of the structure of NBC’s coverage, they completely muffed it.

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[Tom Wolper]

During the Olympics I saw an AP story that Olympics ratings in prime time were way down. When I tried to find it to post a link here it disappeared. I thought there would be more discussion in the media about how NBC was handling the games and their ratings. If there was I didn't see it though I also wasn't putting any time into searching for it.

I saw this Slate article this morning. It notes that the prime time numbers were 15.5 million on average for prime time, the lowest in decades. The writer gives context to the numbers, both that overall prime time linear viewing has been dropping, and that viewing is shifting to streaming. I thought the article gave a good wrapup of where TV and sports are now.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/08/future-tense-newsletter-olympics-audience-cord-cutting.html

[Bob Jersey]

Cleaning out my (PTD) inbox I found this... could it have been "your man"?

https://apnews.com/article/2020-tokyo-olympics-soccer-entertainment-sports-arts-and-entertainment-1e0a900622b327f5ea155e7609b9c84f (link)

B

Tom Wolper, August 16th: