The Windkey and the Lamplighter

I love the Olympics. I was a little busy trying to graduate in 2004 to watch much of the Sydney games, but I was really looking forward to watching the Games in Beijing—especially gymnastics, swimming, diving, and sprinting. Conveniently, thanks to Michael Phelps, Nastia Liukin, Shawn Johnson, and Liu Xiang, (among others) all those events are televised heavily. I even now own a television, so I can watch them. Great! I’m happy to schedule an hour or three out of my evening to watch video coverage, or to get up at 6 AM to watch an event that’s happening in the evening in Beijing.

When I realized that It Is The Future, and NBC would be streaming video on the internet, I was even more excited—more coverage of athletes and events that don’t normally make the TV broadcast. How can it go wrong?

Then I actually tried nbcolympics.com, and all my futurist optimism was dashed. The first blow was that the video isn’t in Flash or QuickTime or even RealPlayer formats–it’s in Microsoft Silverlight, which requires me to download a new player. Even if, technically, it might work on my Mac, I’m completely unthrilled. I downloaded it to my work computer, though, since it’s already hopelessly tainted by M$Technology, and I really wanted to watch gymnastics during my lunchbreak.

It’s even worse than I feared. I have yet to get through a more than 5 minutes of video without the player jumping back to the beginning of the video. This is irritating on a 2 minute video, and COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE in a two hour video. I think I reset the video of the women’s team beam events over a dozen times. It’s not because of my slow connection, either—the first time I got a message about a slow connection was today. Something is triggering their video to restart, often at places where a commercial break was in the TV coverage or where they edited the video to remove some of the downtime between competitors. Whatever it is, it’s definitely annoying.

And that’s not all. Even if Silverlight worked *perfectly*, I’d be really mad at NBC for their scheduling.
An example: Saturday night I checked the competition schedules for Women’s Vault, because I really wanted to see Oksana Chusovitina of Germany vault. (She won a silver medal at 33, in her fifth Olympics!!! Take that, 14-year-old Chinese girls!) It was scheduled for Sunday evening in Beijing, which means Sunday morning in Boston. Great! I can watch vaulting and still have time to get to church. So I got up, and turned on my local NBC affiliate—and got local news covering a guy getting hit by a T-train while crossing the track on his cell phone. No vaulting, no Olympics, just depressing TV news.

So I turned to the web. Surely, even if the event isn’t on my local station because my neighbors need to know about John Edwards’ latest apology, it will be online? Nope. It’s not online until it’s aired on your local station. pejoratives about greedy NBC executives excised in the interest of remaining vaguely professional. Disappointed, I tuned in Sunday evening around 8, figuring they’d surely air the meet 12 hours delayed, right in the middle of “Prime Time”. Nope. Hours of commercials, beach volleyball, and interviews with Michael Phelps later, they showed the vault competition at nearly 11 PM. AARGH! They could have at least given a detailed schedule for what events would be shown at what times, but that would have denied McDonalds, Chevy, and Visa valuable time advertising to a vegetarian who drives only small cars and doesn’t ever carry a balance on her credit cards. Somehow, I fail to see the wisdom in this.

After all that, I can hardly find room to complain that the TV coverage of the women’s all-around ignored most of the non-US, non-China competitors, or about the new Code of Points that denied Nadia Liukin a shared gold medal with He Kexin and tainted Kexin’s victory even more than the controversy over her age.

I *love* watching the pixielike gymnasts, the athletic swimmers and sprinters, and all the other athletes. I just wish it didn’t have to be so frustrating to get the video.