NBC Olympics Coverage Deserves No Medal

I must admit to only being a modest fan of the Olympics but I do enjoy seeing some of the more exciting events like swimming and gymnastics. What has bothered me in trying to watch this is the seemingly idiotic coverage by NBC where these important events don’t start until 10 or 11 at night while ‘prime time’ is filled with things like beach volleyball.

Now of course time zones play a role in Olympic coverage and with the games in China it means that the events are 12-15 hours ahead of us (depending on where you live in the US). This mean that in order to air events live here they have to occur sometime in the morning in China.

I understand that NBC heavily pressured the Olympic authorities to move the swimming events to the morning rather than running them in the afternoon or evening. This was pretty controversial because Europe is  5-8 hours ahead of New York, so starting the big events at 10pm in New York means running them between 3am and 6am in most of Europe.

I assume that the fact that the prime events are run at 10pm in New York has something to do with the fact that there was some reason they could not take place earlier (perhaps the athletes require a certain amount of time to prepare and such). Obviously moving things back to 8pm EST would not change the problem in Europe, so there is no logic there.

Nor does it seem to make sense that they put the prime events on later assuming people would already watch between 8pm and 10pm since they put they most boring stuff on then.

So for those on the East Coast having to watch the prime events between 10pm and midnight it would seem to be pretty much a matter of time zones and logistics (either than or the networks are simply choosing to shaft the entire country). But what I do not understand is why we have to do so on the West Coast.

Now having lived in California most of my life I understand that the East Coast is the only thing that matters when it comes to televison and that we in the West are the untouchables. But if you are already making the decision to air them at 10pm-midnight on the East, why cant you air them between 7pm and 9pm in California ?

I don’t think the networks would show the Presidential Debates live in New York and taped in California. They recognize that people want to see the events live. The same holds true for the big events at the Olympics.

Bad bad form to NBC.