If you're good enough at blocking competition, it doesn't matter how poorly you do the actual job. The "AT&T" philosophy.
Last Olympics I paid any attention to was because I had a C band satellite dish and could browse the backhauls and unattended camera feeds. Must have been '96 in Atlanta.
The "competition" isn't other broadcasts of Olympics. It's netflix, xbox, twitter and other sports options. It definitely does matter how well they do their actual job, and right now they're failing.
How was ATT not good at what they did? Yes they were a monopoly, but they provided reliable phone service to much of the US, and were required to built to cold war standards (reading about the long lines facilities is fascinating, with these massive concrete buildings and redundant backup generators). They also had an expanding wireless phone network (mostly for car phones) that was heavily rolled out by the early 80s. They put heavy research into satellite communication and laying undersea cable as well, not to mention bell labs.
Many of the complaints against att are entirely valid, but I have not once heard that they were actually bad at running a phone company. That so many of the baby bells remain around in some form (ATT itself nowadays, Verizon, many local phone companies) seems to be a testament of that.
If you have cable TV, you can watch everything at nbcolympics.com/schedule so it’s actually quite accessible. I believe you can watch 30 minutes of content without signing in using your cable account.
Also, the author is wrong. NBC broadcast the opening ceremonies at 7am [0]. The author must have seen a rebroadcast.
Came here to say this. They showed it live at 7 AM, on broadcast. No accounts or payment required.
I know some people have issues getting a signal over the air (live in an apartment, too far from source), but usually when I talk to people about broadcast they just have some weird hangup about buying a $10 antenna and connecting it to their television.
I don't know if it's available outside the country. But the CBC is streaming everything online, no login required.
They have streams with commentary for the major events that they are televising but you can also watch the raw international streams with no commentary for everything else.
The streams are recorded and available at any time too.
If it's available in the US, or you have a VPN, I'd look into that.
Requiring the purchase of an unrelated product for no reason other than padding subscriber numbers for NBC’s benefit qualifies as “making it difficult”.
I love to talk shit on huge broadcasters but using their app for the olympics has been amazing. I just watched 2 days of replays from their app, all with minimal or no commentary, and all with few commercials (like 1/30 minutes).
Not only do you get replays for literally every event, but they don't even spoil them with the final scores or results.
Edit: It looks like I failed to mention that cable is required so that's a huge caveat. Also some folks seem to get more commercials than I have.
I don't understand why the Olympics have to be so fast. Build an insane amount of infrastructure, have dozens of events simultaneously all of the time, then ship everyone home.
I end up missing just about everything. If I want to catch some of the storylines, I really need them spoon fed to me.
If they stretched out the events over a month or two we would get double benefits - we could actually consume more of the events, and they would drastically reduce their need to build venues/villages/etc.
I feel like NBC took a huge step back from the Olympics app from 5 years ago. It had a good organization of sports with schedules and the ability to watch replays or live events. AFAIK, streaming-wise, Peacock is the only want to watch them this year and the interface is terrible for this. Just trying to browse what is available made me decide to skip attempting to watch the games, I was willing to subscribe to Peacock too.
I had a similar experience. I love watching the Olympics, even obscure sports that no one cares about. In past years I’ll leave it on in the background while I do other things alL the time. This time I was attempting to watch the olympics and due to the sheer difficulty on finding what to watch I just gave up on watching them altogether. Even the website had me confused on the schedule.. are they showing Japans times or what time zone for this schedule? It’s like they actively don’t want people watching the Olympics this year.
At least Eurosport does that in Europe, I paid €12.49 for an annual pass so it's valid for this Olympics and the winter too in February. And you can watch rewatch every single event
Paying $20 to watch something that should be freely viewable anyway just makes advertisers pay even more to get your attention. They won't ever go away until advertising literally becomes illegal.
Given that the event is in Japan, I'm curious why someone would hire a US-based service to stream it rather than just a Japanese based one.
Actually, I'm surprised the Olympics themselves don't have a direct subscription for streaming the entire event where people can sign up and stream it. I'm under the impression that the event is designed for the PHYSICAL audience first, and streaming it is kind of a poorly though out last minute thing.
Oh that’s gone and got cocked up too. Discovery have paid a fortune for the europe-wide individual streaming rights, so BBC can only broadcast two streams at a time. You can only watch the individual sports streams on Eurosport/Discovery plus. This is a kafkaesque mess though - e.g. PS only has Eurosport app, but to sign up and subscribe, you have to go through discovery+, whose credentials can’t log you in to Eurosport; obviously a huge improvement over just having it all on the BBC….
In Australia we have the 7Plus, or 7+, app which works with Android TV and allows you to choose from various sports that are currently live, plus replays.
The app requires sign in via email address, which normally would turn me away, but it's worth it to burn a throw away email address for the sake of the Olympics.
There's probably a geofence, butt if you can get an Australian exit node VPN then give it a bash.
These sports have been converted so far:
3x3 Basketball (great energy!)
Table Tennis
Badminton
Rowing
Skateboarding
Gymnastics
Swimming
Equestrian
Soccer
Hockey
Basketball
Softball
Handball
Volleyball
Tennis
Water Polo
I have signed into the "NBC Sports" app on Roku with my basic package Dish Network credentials, and that allows me to view any event live or on replay. This is in USA. I'm not sure what else we expect NBC to do here. I have watched canoeing, cycling, rugby, equestrian, TKD, sailing, etc. Of course their headline/primetime coverage is shit and doesn't know sports other than swimming and gymnastics exist. They have the Today Shitshow people running it.
I have a plex lifetime subscription and a TV tuner in the attic with an antenna that can see local TV stations. My server in the basement runs Plex and can connect to the tuner over ethernet.
I told plex to record all Olympic events and to mark the commercials. The result is still a mess, but I have everything NBC broadcasts and a "skip commercials" button pops up for all of the true commercials. I still get all the annoying talking heads and other commercial endorsements that are not commercials, but I can scan forward until the thumbnails match what I want to see. The Olympics every 4 years is one of the main reasons I justify plex.
Depending on where you are, you are at best getting highlights.
I like watching the sports they don't like showing. Nothing worse than NBC claiming they will be showing one sport only to find that it was 30 minutes of talking heads and some gymnast/swimmers life story.
You must be a youngster. NBC has been fucking up the Olympics broadcasts since they started back in 1988. They've always been overly USA-centric, they refuse to air the broadcasts when the events happen, insisting on time shifting everything, and loading so many commercials into the thing, it is impossible to watch. I pretty much quit watching 3 or 4 olympics ago. Today, as I tune through the channels, I always see they're in commercial when I go through the NBC channels.
NBC's coverage is especially bad if you compare it to coverage from other countries. NBC mostly focuses on sports where the US will do well, so if you care about a sport in which the US doesn't have a strong foothold then you're out of luck. Last Olympics I thought maybe they could treat this as back catalogue content that you could watch online, but I could only find heavily edited highlights. And they not only fill the feed with tons of commercials, but they also add little features about certain athletes' journey to the Olympics or some other thing that take time away from watching something else.
It's bewildering that they make it so hard to watch the event, the coverage is bad, and then they bemoan the fact that viewership is at an all time low.
NBC has held the Olympics hostage in the USA. But the last time I made an effort, a few Olympics ago, I did try to watch the gold medal round of women's judo to see the American. I couldn't watch it because NBC was showing a qualifying round of women's handball: Poland vs Lithuania or some such. So much for USA-centric.
The Olympics happen too damned fast. On the very first day after opening we get gold medal results of competitions. NBC assumes that the US crowd wants to see more events than others, so a lot of them never get shown. We just get surprised with announcements of placements, which takes all the suspense out of the games. At the same time, US media is under no obligation to keep results under wraps, which means that they get reported in realtime before we get to see them on TV.
So they have that to deal with. But that doesn't excuse the ridiculous amount of zoom calls from D-league commentators and celebrities who waste valuable time that could have been used to show events to instead gush incoherently about "what the Olympics mean to me."
Really, nobody cares. And if they did care, we have social media for them to express their opinions.
The NBC youtube channel does a great job of posting highlights but they also put spoilers in the titles of their videos and it ruins the highlights for me.
Looking at the latest video "Katie Ledecky Looks Dominant In 1500m Swim..."
Let me know its the 1500m swim event and quit ruining the intrigue before I can click.
The way they cut the transmission live to display commercials, including the live comments and replays, is infuriating. Seeing the same ad over and over and over again while trying to pay attention to the action makes me mad at the company advertising and it's not even their fault.
The Peacock app from NBC is terrible for a different reason. It has a page for each sport, but the first thing it lists is highlight clips named things like "See <country X>'s win in all angles!". Please don't show me spoilers before you give me the opportunity to watch the event!!
I've been watching on the "site where you can actually watch live. And they have replays… of preliminary matches" and I've found it to be really good. You can choose any sport to watch live, or to watch the compilation broadcasts that they show on TV. You can pause and rewind broadcasts. Many of the sport titles do have the competitor or country names in them. And each stream does have a button the side to view the rules of the sport.
Very interesting; I wonder if the reported viewership dropoff is because the numbers come from cable viewership numbers only, drop in interest in the Olympics in general, or what this article is talking about regarding making it so hard to actually watch.
For myself, the only reason I was reminded the Olympics were a thing was because of articles like this.
I've previously watched a lot of the Olympics and think it's a great way to bring the world together every now and then. Now this year you have to jump through all these hoops (pun partly intended) and you don't even get commentary for much of it - the IOC are being greedy to a new level.
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
Last Olympics I paid any attention to was because I had a C band satellite dish and could browse the backhauls and unattended camera feeds. Must have been '96 in Atlanta.
[+] [-] bko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pottertheotter|4 years ago|reply
If anyone reads this and is wondering what exactly it means, I highly recommend the book The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T by Steve Coll.
[+] [-] ApolloFortyNine|4 years ago|reply
Many of the complaints against att are entirely valid, but I have not once heard that they were actually bad at running a phone company. That so many of the baby bells remain around in some form (ATT itself nowadays, Verizon, many local phone companies) seems to be a testament of that.
[+] [-] furyofantares|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totalZero|4 years ago|reply
Also, the author is wrong. NBC broadcast the opening ceremonies at 7am [0]. The author must have seen a rebroadcast.
[0] https://sports.nbcsports.com/2021/07/23/when-do-the-tokyo-ol...
[+] [-] Brendinooo|4 years ago|reply
I know some people have issues getting a signal over the air (live in an apartment, too far from source), but usually when I talk to people about broadcast they just have some weird hangup about buying a $10 antenna and connecting it to their television.
[+] [-] standardUser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coopsmoss|4 years ago|reply
They have streams with commentary for the major events that they are televising but you can also watch the raw international streams with no commentary for everything else.
The streams are recorded and available at any time too.
If it's available in the US, or you have a VPN, I'd look into that.
[+] [-] kevinwang|4 years ago|reply
This is the site mentioned and linked to in the article as a "site where you can actually watch live. And they have replays… of preliminary matches"
I've also found out to be quite good-- not sure why the author is so negative of it.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jressey|4 years ago|reply
Not only do you get replays for literally every event, but they don't even spoil them with the final scores or results.
Edit: It looks like I failed to mention that cable is required so that's a huge caveat. Also some folks seem to get more commercials than I have.
[+] [-] legitster|4 years ago|reply
I end up missing just about everything. If I want to catch some of the storylines, I really need them spoon fed to me.
If they stretched out the events over a month or two we would get double benefits - we could actually consume more of the events, and they would drastically reduce their need to build venues/villages/etc.
[+] [-] dariusj18|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smaryjerry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rewtraw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|4 years ago|reply
Is that bad business?
Because I'm afraid I am sitting out the Olympics this year. :-(
[+] [-] sveme|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdz|4 years ago|reply
https://www.eurosportplayer.com/olympics
[+] [-] robbiemitchell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] criddell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhyNotHugo|4 years ago|reply
Actually, I'm surprised the Olympics themselves don't have a direct subscription for streaming the entire event where people can sign up and stream it. I'm under the impression that the event is designed for the PHYSICAL audience first, and streaming it is kind of a poorly though out last minute thing.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
ps. I did try to pay for a UK TV license too but they don't seem to have the concept of someone outside the UK paying for this.
[+] [-] te_chris|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BLKNSLVR|4 years ago|reply
The app requires sign in via email address, which normally would turn me away, but it's worth it to burn a throw away email address for the sake of the Olympics.
There's probably a geofence, butt if you can get an Australian exit node VPN then give it a bash.
These sports have been converted so far:
3x3 Basketball (great energy!) Table Tennis Badminton Rowing Skateboarding Gymnastics Swimming Equestrian Soccer Hockey Basketball Softball Handball Volleyball Tennis Water Polo
[+] [-] jessaustin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brokenmachine|4 years ago|reply
I just can't bear to watch sports at 25fps, it's like watching a slideshow.
[+] [-] wscott|4 years ago|reply
I told plex to record all Olympic events and to mark the commercials. The result is still a mess, but I have everything NBC broadcasts and a "skip commercials" button pops up for all of the true commercials. I still get all the annoying talking heads and other commercial endorsements that are not commercials, but I can scan forward until the thumbnails match what I want to see. The Olympics every 4 years is one of the main reasons I justify plex.
[+] [-] asciimov|4 years ago|reply
I like watching the sports they don't like showing. Nothing worse than NBC claiming they will be showing one sport only to find that it was 30 minutes of talking heads and some gymnast/swimmers life story.
[+] [-] sizzzzlerz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enumjorge|4 years ago|reply
It's bewildering that they make it so hard to watch the event, the coverage is bad, and then they bemoan the fact that viewership is at an all time low.
[+] [-] supportlocal4h|4 years ago|reply
I guess you'll never please everyone.
[+] [-] rottencupcakes|4 years ago|reply
I tried searching for this when the olympics started and I gave up entirely.
Is there any ability to get this?
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sodafountan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|4 years ago|reply
So they have that to deal with. But that doesn't excuse the ridiculous amount of zoom calls from D-league commentators and celebrities who waste valuable time that could have been used to show events to instead gush incoherently about "what the Olympics mean to me."
Really, nobody cares. And if they did care, we have social media for them to express their opinions.
[+] [-] nyjah|4 years ago|reply
Looking at the latest video "Katie Ledecky Looks Dominant In 1500m Swim..."
Let me know its the 1500m swim event and quit ruining the intrigue before I can click.
[+] [-] goshx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbsks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinwang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattlondon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buzzdenver|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] annoyingmous|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sergers|4 years ago|reply
CBC comes on free to air cable if u have an antenna, and they have an app for free access even if not a tv subscriber.
Plus they have a deal with Amazon Prime, the CBC live streams of events are available though Amazon Prime too.
[+] [-] spookthesunset|4 years ago|reply
That or twitch but I don’t think twitch does 4K and it’s client apps aren’t pervasive like YouTube. They don’t even have an Apple TV app.
[+] [-] kuraudo|4 years ago|reply
For myself, the only reason I was reminded the Olympics were a thing was because of articles like this.
[+] [-] petercooper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samkelly|4 years ago|reply