Olympics in HD

[Smokey]

I usually don't watch sports, but finding Olympics fun to watch as this is my first time watching it in HD on local NBC channel. Their entire late night slot is dedicated to Olymics and picture quality is awesome.

You can see these athletes are in top form in their fields where even a 1/10 of a second matter. I don't cheer for a particular team or country as its all good and is done in spirit of human endurance :)

[Hyfi]

Sports like the Super Bowl, and Olympics, is where you will see the best pictures pumped out in HD.

[recoveryone]

Slow motion with the high speed cameras is awesome, where you can see each drop of water splashing away as the swimmers make each stroke, and see what the judges are looking for in the gymnastis vaults. I just wish NBC would show more of the other events, I mean on Saturday they spent 5 hours of broadcast time on a 150 mile mens bike race that only had 1 min of excitment (last 200 meters) and then spend another 3 hours on the womens bike race same course as the men and again the only excitment was the last 200 meters. I know Boxing, weightlifing, Trap shooting, ping pong and a host of other events that are going on that could be shown during these two bike races.

On my Vios system NBC has full time Soccer and Basketball channels setup, but nothing for highlights of other events in real time. The last real full coverage of Olympics events I remember was the 72 Games when ABC did it and that was haulted due to the terrorist attacks. The Olympics are only once every four years and it show case each nations best, I don't understand why US televison can't support full coverage all day like it was in the past.

[recoveryone]

Thanks goodness for all this new hightech social media, I have to rely upon tweets via ESPN of what is happening in real time.

[Hyfi]

I watch all the news from other countries just to find out what is REALLY going on in the US.

[dean_martin]

The first HD broadcast I ever saw several years ago was a women's gymnastics event on an early Pioneer Elite plasma. It made me blush.

[ForeverAutumn]

I love the Olympics. I wish that I didn't have to work so that I could stay home and watch as much as I can fit in.

I agree with Smokey about not cheering for a particular team or country. Although I love to see Canadians win, I was fascinated by the Russian ladies volleyball team on the weekend and found myself cheering for them. I watched two matches with them and the front person was making some awesome blocks. Of course, if and when they play the Canadians I will have to root for the Canucks. But in the meantime, my money is on the Ruskies. :)

I guess that I'm so used to watching everything on HD now that I don't even give it a second thought. I'll have to pay closer attention as I watch the games.

[Woochifer]

Of course, if you want to watch the Olympics live and in HD, you'll need a cable subscription. :) It's crazy that NBC's prime time coverage is so much worse than the live coverage on NBC Sports Network, MSNBC, CNBC, and Bravo (or even the NBC's own coverage during the day that shows more live events). It's like they've been sitting on that footage for half a day, and can't resist the urge to chop it up and re-edit everything like a soap opera.

And on that live subject ... NBC has been posting every Olympic event live on their website. Yes, you need a cable/satellite subscription to access the site, but 80% of U.S. households do subscribe.

Just the other day, I was streaming the NBCSN feed during my lunch break, and the NBC website showed the number of viewers watching the different live events. I saw that the men's gymnastics team final had ~50,000 viewers, the NBCSN feed had less than 5,000 viewers, and the swimming event had about 50,000 viewers. I think that altogether, the total number of streaming viewers at that time was less than 150,000.

If that number is accurate (NBC's website no longer displays the number of online viewers for each event), then that further debunks a lot of the techie blathering about how streaming is taking over. Consider that NBC's prime time audience for the Olympics has averaged more than 30 million viewers, and the daytime viewership has been more than 7 million viewers.

This means that the streaming audience was maybe 2% of the number watching the Olympics just on NBC during the day (and that's not even counting the number of people watching the Olympics on the other cable channels). And the number of people streaming the marquee events live over the internet is less than 0.5% of the prime time broadcast that shows everything on tape delay. I guess that the head of ESPN's online programming was correct when he noted that the ESPN streaming audience was less than 2% of the broadcast audience.

For all the hype about how social media and streaming are making broadcast networks obsolete, it seems that people who actually watch the events have something else to say.