Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics? | Hacker News Reader

Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics?

mleverything.substack.com

277 pointsbko290 comments

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.

ATT is not comparable to NBC. ATT has a structural monopoly, without which society cannot communicate.

NBC is a glorified ad broker, and they could fall off the face of the earth and no one would notice. Of course, they are owned by Comcast, who is in similar position as ATT, so I assume Comcast is just milking these legacy companies for all they are worth.

My solution is to simply not watch. If consuming entertainment content is not as simple as search, click, pay, watch, then I simply do not get enough utility from watching TV.

And if I am paying, I do not want to see ad breaks, another dealbreaker.

In the case of a single program that's broadcast, they're somewhat comparable since NBC has a monopoly on the Olympics.

Problem is there are enough millions of people satisfied with this delivery, that NBC will make enough money and keep their anti-competitive monopoly.

Quite a lot of the content is only available with their Peacock app. Free if you have Comcast/Xfinity, but still ads. If you pay maybe you also get ads, not sure. But the app is terribly slow, next to unusable. Click navigation buttons on the remote and its multiple seconds for the UI to reflect input. Netflix, Hulu, HBOMax apps all have reasonable responsiveness, Peacock is atrocious.

I imagine in less than 50 years we'll consider Google a glorified ad broker too.

uBLock Origin appears to work to make Peacock usable by blocking all the ads. I do recall that initially I had to do some extra blocking because they had a way around it but now uBlock appears to just work out of the box.

The Olympics are the monopoly. They are the ones who auction off U.S. television rights to a single entity. NBC is simply the company which won that auction.

I'm curious what you think NBC is doing wrong here. Should they call up CBS and offer to share the coverage that it just spent hundreds of millions for? Should it invite randos to Tokyo with their iPhones to stream the games on Twitch? Should it just make the entire Olympics pay-per-view?

As always, if you don't like it, start your own world-wide athletic contest.

That’s not the point BEFORE we used to be able to see All the Countries complete not just the USA NBC has done a shit job at showing all athlete and only show the “popular” sports who win medals. Did you know that in the Tokyo this year in Germany’s Women’s gymnastics wore shorts instead of leotards, NO All they Showed you in “prime time television” was Simone Bilies this Simone that, and then every so often they show Russia who ended up doing better then the usa

I don’t know about you but it literally sucks that so many of these athletes work hard and because they didn’t place in medals or are not a favorite sport you have to try and stream on peakcock which has been down since the 1st day of the Olympics

Literally during the 1500m swim race while lidecky was racing for gold they aird commercials in the middle of a meddling race and gave some stupid story on how all the miles she swam in her life she could swim from Dc to Tokyo like they ruin the fact that it’s about the worlds sports and show casing everyone’s hard work not cutting out what they think is unimportant

Also they sport commentators literally sound bored

People have the right to be up set who are you to shit on them

> The "AT&T" philosophy.

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.

I feel like your anecdote about not watching the Olympics is a direct contradiction to your claim about the "AT&T philosophy"

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.

> 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.

The Baby Bells were what happened when an entrenched national monopoly was broken up into entrenched local monopolies. Their continued existence (and the reformation of many of them into the new AT&T) doesn't really prove anything about how good the old monopoly was at running things.

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.

[0] https://sports.nbcsports.com/2021/07/23/when-do-the-tokyo-ol...

Requiring the purchase of an unrelated product for no reason other than padding subscriber numbers for NBC’s benefit qualifies as “making it difficult”.

Several of the tv stations broadcasting the olympics are on cable (eg USA). I understand the desire to watch for free, but cable is certainly not an unrelated product here.

If you have a raspberry pi you can probably set up a vpn at a house with cable and watch it that way. For my provider I think they simply match the IP to the ISP (the login was automatic).

Comcast owns NBC and directly benefits from cable subscriptions. NBC also owns all the rights and doesn’t have to put stuff on the cable channels it owns. That’s why people are complaining.

Cable is unrelated if you have access to broadband internet and the digital video signals are being transmitted via the internet.

Cable is only related if you own a cable company and want to continue making money for being an unnecessary middleman.

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.

   they just have some weird hangup about buying a $10 antenna and connecting it to their television.

I think this hang up could be the installation. Where I live you need to mount the antenna at least on an exterior wall, if not the roof to get a clear signal. Then you have to run coax to your TV, through walls, perhaps multiple locations or you can only watch broadcast on that one TV. It’s easily hours of work, including trip to the hardware store, and having the tools. Still worth the one time effort from some, but the barrier is a lot higher than a one time $10 expense.

So many homes these days had at one point been wired for cable or satellite. The antenna uses the same cabling and often has one or two big splitters to run to each room. Its pretty trivial to change the "source" side of that to the antenna and disconnect unused rooms.

> Where I live you need to mount the antenna at least on an exterior wall, if not the roof to get a clear signal

Windows work too, depending on how your room is oriented relative to the nearest broadcast tower.

It's really not that much work. I have a cheap $20 antenna hanging in a window (you could use a suction cup) and I can get almost 40 TV channels.

As far as distribution, I connect my antenna to an HDHomeRun device. I can either stream directly from the device, use a DLNA client on my LAN, or I also have it hooked into Plex server for DVR and live remote viewing.

A basic HDHomeRun device goes for around $100 but I'm sure you can pick up an older model on eBay for less. You could even bridge it into a raspberry pi or some other wifi device so that you don't need to run Ethernet cables around.

> I have a cheap $20 antenna hanging in a window (you could use a suction cup) and I can get almost 40 TV channels

This doesn't work for everyone. When I put one up, I had to get a $100 directional antenna, a signal booster and mount it in the attic. Even then we had difficulty picking up some stations. Granted our neighborhood is in a big region, a good ways out and in a large depression.

> Then you have to run coax to your TV, through walls

You can also try under, over, or around the side of a door, or through a window, using a small section of flat coax like this [1].

An alternative I've considered is an Amazon Fire TV Recast [2]. That's an OTA DVR that physically connects to an antenna and power, and then can stream live or recorded content over your Wifi to an Amazon Fire TV Stick plugged into your TV.

With that you only need to get the antenna to wherever you put the Recast. If your antenna was on the roof, for example, you could place the Recast in your attic. Then you only need to go trough one wall or through an attic vent.

I've been wondering if a Recast could reasonably be powered by a battery and put in a waterproof box outside, so that (1) there would be no need to run the antenna wire into the house, and (2) you might not need to tie the antenna ground to the house ground (which can be a real pain if you want to follow code and the places where you can get good reception are nowhere near your house's grounding rod).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DVKOOA2

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Fire-TV-Recast-over-the-air-DVR-500GB...

And if you don't want to deal with Amazon hardware in your home SiliconDust [0] has been doing this for a long time and their products work well.

[0] https://www.silicondust.com/

> they just have some weird hangup about buying a $10 antenna and connecting it to their television.

A few years ago I tried to get OTA to watch the Oscars. This was after the 2009 digital switchover. I did some research and bought a couple different antennas, looked online so they could be directed at the intended tower. I got nothing. It may have been because the signal was blocked by a mountain, but I lived near UCLA in Los Angeles at the time.

With streaming and cable as competition there just isn't incentive on the broadcast and receiving side to set up a good enough system for a lot of people.

The digital broadcast is great because you can (theoretically) watch any event you want.

As the OP of the article stated, this is actually rather frustrating to do in practice.

I do not know anybody with cable TV. It's like saying "If you have a rotary phone..."

Everyone I know sans maybe one person has cable/satellite. So I don't know what future you're living in.

The problem to me is they aren't showing replays that I feel a lot of people want to see on air, so you can't watch at a bar/restaurant. This to me is the major problem with sports on streaming. People like to watch at bars, but bars often don't have streaming devices on hand or a staff that wants to deal with it.

Maybe it's a generational thing? I don't know anybody with cable or satellite, not even my parents.

For me it's not generational, but cheaper. Adding the base TV package to my internet is cheaper than no-cap internet alone.

I rarely watch live TV, but it helps that I can use my TV login to stream most of the channels on-demand.

The only people I know with cable/satellite TV subscriptions are 50+ years old who grew up in the US. All my immigrant elders use IPTV boxes now to get their international channels.

I just turned 50 and I have cable TV for the first time now since I lived with my parents in the 80's. Maybe along with your eyesight and your hearing when you turn 50 you start to lose that part of your mental reasoning that tells you cable TV is a bad idea.

Seriously though, I got tired of switching to different streaming providers when one of them suddenly lost access to some specific content that I was interested in. Cable now is just another streaming content provider.

I'm not that old though, I'm in the youngest bracket to be paying bills outside of a college student.

I think the people that have cable/satellite TV are roughly the same ones that still have landline phones.

Sure, it exists, not like there's nobody, but I'm pretty sure it's less than half in total.

I can think of tons of people I know with cable and the only person I can think of with a landline is my grandma, and my stepdad’s extremely rural vacation cabin

Not true, more than half of the US has cable/satellite subscriptions (~61%). It has shrunk but it is still the majority. I don't buy the argument that "cord cutting" is necessarily less expensive when you add up all the streaming services, especially given streaming services are currently low balling to bring in customers.

In any case, no one has addressed the problem of sports bars/bars being unable to service customers on streaming exclusive events.

> Everyone I know sans maybe one person has cable/satellite. So I don't know what future you're living in.

The same one as me, apparently. I don't know a single person who has cable or satellite either.

I know many people with cable, but only 1 with a rotary phone.

My mom lives with me, and she likes cable, so we added it for relatively little to our existing Verizon package. It's nice to be able to log into streaming sites like the NBC Olympics.

> I do not know anybody with cable TV.

AIUI, these things typically described as “if you have cable TV” apply to most cable, satellite, and internet multichannel video programming distributors (so, yes, cable/satellite, but also Youtube TV and similar online services.)

45% of American households have cable TV https://www.statista.com/statistics/612660/paid-services-bro...

> If you have cable TV, you can watch everything at nbcolympics.com/schedule so it’s actually quite accessible.

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.

Because it is hard to find, not very well advertised, and isn't free unless you have a cable provider (youtube tv does work).

For me, I had Youtube TV record everything, but NBC doesn't show everything, and its completely US centric coverage (I like watching the competition). On demand wasn't helpful either.

I tried Peacock (NBC's app) thinking that's where they were hiding all of their coverage. And again not everything is there, and much of it is behind paywall.

Fortunately, my wife clicked on the Olympics section of our Roku and it prompted us to install the NBC Olympics app. Then I had to sign into it, because it only provides 30 mins of viewing without a cable plan. On top of that they are injecting a lot of commercials into the programming, so I'm not sure why they couldn't air all of it for free (with commercials)

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.

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.

Agreed - just log into app via cable provider and voila, Olympic paradise.

And if you don't have cable?

This is the problem I'm experiencing. The best I've found is fuboTV and it's not great. I don't have cable in my house. I'd be willing to pay NBC $100 for access to all of their live and on-demand olympic coverage (what's available through the website, etc.), but that's not even an option.

Can you not login to the nbc olympics site/app using your fuboTV login and get access to exactly what you're looking for? [0]

They also list youtube TV and Sling TV as login options.

[0] - Literally asking, as I can see they're available as sign-in TV Providers, but can't test it without a sub.

It appears to specifically be "Sign in with your Cable Provider." They list the providers and fuboTV is not one of them.

EDIT: I was wrong! I used "search all providers" and indeed, fuboTV was listed there, so I signed in with the credentials and it seems to work. Thanks for the nudge!

Glad it worked out!

I ended up adding the 'Live TV' option to my existing Hulu subscription, and now have access to all the replays as well as the primetime coverage. It's working very well. It's ~$65/mo extra, so I'll just cancel that add-on after the games end.

I'd prefer to have native internet streaming coverage. IIRC the 2016 or '18 games had fantastic free coverage on streaming boxes, with a nice app that had an easy way to watch live for any sport. not sure why we are regressing so badly. Probably money.

VPN to the UK and watch BBC coverage?

I'll admit that I don't know if that works or not, I'm in the UK so I'm spoiled by wall-to-wall BBC coverage.

Those that I trust say that most of the content providers have gotten good at blocking known vpn hosts.

I use my antenna and use Plex as a DVR.

I agree, except for the “few commercials” part. That seems highly dependent on the event. For events with regular short gaps between action, they seem to show a ton of ads.

On one of the replays I watched it was a one minute commercial every 4 minutes. They paused the feed, played the commercial, and resumed the feed.

Is it 4K or at least higher framerate?

On the iPad app, I definitely got spoilers. I wanted to watch men’s cycling, but it finished in the middle of my night so I went to watch it in the morning. As soon as I open the app there is a big tile on the first screen spoiling the result. Then the next day, same thing happens with a basketball game I wanted to see (USA vs France).

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 believe one of the reasons for this is that in general the sporting calendar is pretty full and this two week period in July/August is always empty.

But aren't most sporting calendars built around the Olympics? I'm not talking MLB, NBA etc, but all other sports (athletics, swimming, gymnastics etc) have their World Cups and qualifying etc scheduled specifically to prepare for the Olympics.

The US pro sports are the tail that wags the dog.

Sure but let's look at a few.

NBA - just finished season, many players, even those that played in the playoffs have made the trip to Toyoko. So seems like the NBA could continue to supply players for the Olympics.

Golf - they could continue to play at the Olympics since an event could easily be scheduled for a Thursday-Sunday as usual.

MLB - no event

NHL - winter event that has supplied players, but it is an issue as the Olympics occur right in the middle of their season.

NFL - no event

Tennis/ATP - super long season normally, could make it a Grand Slam event, or a 1000 event and schedule into season every 4 years. One difficult thing is that doubles teams aren't always from same country. So they would need to mix and therefore affect rankings.

I think it could easily be done for most leagues. The issue is money. The NBA/NHL/PGA/ATP have no immediate financial motivation for sending their players but carry risk in that players can get injured. However, if they see the Olympics as a new source of fans (and therefore income) it could be a win-win.

Yeah I just kinda turn it on when I'm home and catch whatever I can. If I'm being real I'm not THAT invested in any event. It's just fun to watch.

I think it's a "big splash" thing -- make enough waves all at the same time, and you'll spread to people who aren't paying attention. It's the same reason why the video game industry still did a bunch of press conferences all around the same time last year and this year, in place of E3 -- generate enough noise, and you start to move outside the enthusiast press and into mainstream press.

But you can do the same thing with six or eight weeks too, there's something to be said for being a sustained presence to draw people in.

The draw of the olympics is the four year achievement, almost regardless of sport. There are so many of the competitions that could be hyped up far better than they are, and more room for backstories and more room for competition.

I think NBC will punt the olympics pretty soon because of the cost, so we'll see.

That combined with the cost of hosting and a dearth of bidding cities, corrections are coming.

What also mystifies me is that the governing bodies for the main olympic sports don't coordinate their world championships to be in the same period in off years. They could probably capture a much larger percentage of olympic voters if the swimming and track and field champs and gymnastics champs were all scheduled close together and with awareness of each other's schedules.

I don't care about the storylines at all. I dont care about their sob story. I just want to see some humans do some amazing things with their body.

I'm like you, but I have plenty of friends who are all about the story. They want to know all the struggles and heartaches that a person had to get where they are.

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.

The Peacock app coverage is horrible. I ended up paying for Hulu + Live TV to get live coverage as well as the full backlog of replays.

Just let me send you $20 for an Olympics "pass" and give me access to multiple streams so I can pick which events to watch — without commercials.

Is that bad business?

Because I'm afraid I am sitting out the Olympics this year. :-(

I suspect it would cost more than $20 to bypass the ads

Even at an inflated rate of $50 per 1000 impressions (which is higher than most broadcast TV charges), $20 should let you bypass 400 commercials. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Please Gods, no! Black Mirror is almost here.

'Just pay 100 merits to skip..Oh you've used all your skips this hour.'

Beeeeeeeeep 'Resume viewing, resume viewing.

Why is this downvoted? This bleak future isn't too far off honestly. Can't wait until the advertisers start literally torturing us as punishment for withholding our attention. When I watched that episode for the first time I was horrified but reality is even worse: these people think we're literal criminals who are stealing from them if we don't watch ads.

Probably because YouTube and Spotify are already peppered with such interruptions

“upgrade to premium today to disable these annoying ads”

Not even close to the same. Bing was unable to even close his eyes to avoid viewing the ads, and was literally inundated from all sides with all senses they could reach.

We get closer to this every single day.

But this is HN, 1/4[1] of the UB are probably in ads one way or another (ie work for fb/goog et al), another 1/4 of the UB are of the 'growth hacking win at all costs wannabe-CEO (ie lying and creating fake accts a la reddit, you name it).

But I hope another 1/4 of us are conscientious objectors. Leaving 1/4 for those who can't be bothered.

Anyways I usually assume 1/4-1/2 or more of HN will usually disagree with what I say, I don't mind.

[1] All numbers pulled from my behind.

> 400 commercials

So one day of watching?

A regular one-hour-long TV show has about 4 commercial breaks, each with about 10 commercials, so that's 40 commercials an hour. If one was really into the Olympics, they might have their TV on for at least 10 hours during the day (while sometimes doing other tasks). 10 hours * 40 comercials an hour = 400 commercials a day.

Sports broadcasts usually have more commercial breaks of shorter varrying lengths, but I'd estimate it averages the same, if not a higher commercial count per hour.

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.

Why should it be freely viewable?

Feel free to not watch. Fortunately that's not illegal, yet.

Doesn't the NBC Sports app give you pretty much what you are asking for?

If so, it is not evident from their website:

https://www.nbcsports.com/live

It also mentions Peacock, so I would be confused where to go.

No. There is literally no way to pay for an ad-free experience from NBC. The best you can do is subscribe to Fubo or YouTube TV and record everything using their cloud DVR feature, then forward through the ads.

But some events aren't on any of NBC's channels and can only be found at nbcolympics.com (which is the same as what's in the NBC Sports app) which feels like about 50% ad content.

To be clear: you have to pay to even access the content locked away in the NBC Sports App / nbcolympics.com by having a subscription via an NBC partner (YouTube TV, Fubo, traditional cable) for the privilege of watching an infuriating number of ads.

Worse, there's not even any ad variety. It's the same 3 or 4 ads, and the rest of the ad-space is filled with NBC self-promotional content. In some cases, NBC even shrinks down the live coverage to about 50% of the screen so that they can promote their peacock channel to you.

I haven't seen any commercials on the nbcolympics.com streams. They just go to a blank stream during breaks so you can keep the volume on and watch a different stream until it's back.

That's what MLB does and in some ways it's almost more annoying. I wish they would just pull back to their widest shot and pipe in the venue sounds.

I enjoy having it silent so I can keep the volume on while I watch something else. That way I know when to switch back.

That's better than the NBC AppleTV app then which forces ads even into obscure events like Women's Weight Lifting 49kg Group B.

Yesterday while watching some random replay it was pausing the stream every 4 minutes to show 1 minute of commercials. (nbc olympics roku app).

I suspect one could delete the ads shown on NBC Sports app with a pi-hole, but it hasn't seemed important enough to try.

At least on the Apple TV app, I don't think that would be easy. It seems to have ads embedded into the video stream, or at least triggered at specific fixed timestamps in the video stream, and they disable seeking during ad playback, and when you seek across an ad timestamp, they skip you back to the previous ad timestamp, then after the ad finishes they skip you back to the timestamp you seeked to.

Several years ago in the NHL app, poor connectivity with the ad server caused the ads to be skipped. It's possible that this somewhat different app could work the same way...

It's possible, but it really appears to me that these ads are not videos that are loaded separately, but are simply portions of the video stream that the app has tagged with timestamps indicating that they are ads. Perhaps pi-holing the ad server could prevent it from loading metadata about these ad timestamps, but I would guess that it's simply shipped as part of the request that loads all the necessary metadata about the video stream. This really feels more like a system to prevent skipping commercials that are already in the video stream, and less like an integration with a third-party ads SDK that loads its own ads and shows them over the real video.

YouTube TV only lets you see what is broadcast live on a handful of television networks. There is a huge amount of Olympics action that is only available directly from NBC. (You can sign into NBC using YouTube TV as your “cable” provider.)

That's what I meant by:

> But some events aren't on any of NBC's channels and can only be found at nbcolympics.com

That's what's available in Germany. It seems like they livestream every competition, sometimes without commentary. Check whether they blocked your region here: https://www.zdf.de/sport/sport-im-zdf-livestream-live-100.ht...

I love this option to watch all of the events, the ones without the commentary are a refreshing change.

Unfortunately, it is blocked in Canada. (I think, because in German.) Too bad.

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

https://www.eurosportplayer.com/olympics

Is it ad-free? If so, that's a great deal.

Yes it is! If you choose to watch the TV channels (there are two) then they show previous highlights when ad breaks are up. Otherwise all events are available on their own and you can just choose whatever you want to watch.

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.

> Actually, I'm surprised the Olympics themselves don't have a direct subscription for streaming the entire event

NBC (and other networks around the world) pay incredible amounts of money for those rights. And the arrangement makes sense for both parties: NBC can use it to boost viewing figures of their own shows in a way the Olympics couldn't/wouldn't. And they have surfaces to advertise coverage that the Olympics doesn't, or would have to go to considerable lengths to get. So it's a value multiplier for the Olympics to sell it rather than handle it themselves.

In the words of the (NBC) TV Show 30 Rock: "You can't fight synergy, Lemon. It's bigger than all of us"

These things never cease to amaze me. Basically NBC can buy the rights so that people can't just go and buy the stream from the source, but *must* go through this middleman.

Image if you could buy the rights to bread, and anyone wanting to sell/buy bread *must* go through you.

I honestly can't fathom how we'd decayed into societies that allows this kind of nonsense.

because the IOC prints money every four years by selling geo-restricted rights in every country in the world.

I was curious just how much money they printed and found a very nicely put together pdf [0] (page 27 Olympic Broadcasting Revenue Generation) that puts it at 2 or 3 billion USD income for the summer games, and confirms that 72% of Olympic Committee revenue is broadcasting rights. For a global event, getting 50 cents per person seems like a pretty good target, but it’s a shame that a lot of people are unable to watch a lot of the sport since broadcasters pick and choose what to show. I’m sure there’s alternative revenue streams if they got creative but the doc also points out these are long term, stable partnerships where everybody’s happy (except apparently the spectators !)

[0] https://stillmed.olympic.org/media/Document%20Library/Olympi...

Do they really raise more money by selling to a middleman rather than to consumers directly?

> 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.

NBC tried something similar 30 years ago. It was a financial failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympics_Triplecast

That is not comparable to today, where everyone has the ability to instantly stream it on personal devices in their pocket.

NBC's Olympic coverage ... the only reason I've ever found to pay for an IP proxy in the UK so that I could watch the BBC coverage instead.

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.

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….

But I thought uk left Europe :(

The EU.

No, they exited the european union. They didn't actually move their entire country outside of europe.

EU != Europe. The UK left the political and economic union called the EU, they are still very much part of Europe.

Huh, I was thinking of Europe as a political entity such that "Exclusive rights to broadcast in Europe" would exclude UK, but TIL thanks

I don't know how much the BBC paid Discovery for the rights, but France.tv had to do the same and has the right to up to three simultaneous TV broadcasts, and what seems to be all sports streaming online (with an awful UI, but that's another matter). Eurosport/Discovery also broadcasts in France, like in the rest of Europe.

I don't understand this. The Olympics are one of the so-called "crown jewels" which are supposedly guaranteed free to watch. The Broadcasting Act 1996 voids any contract which gives a non-free broadcaster exclusive rights.

But I'm not a lawyer. Maybe it doesn't apply to Discovery because they are streaming not broadcasting? Maybe the BBC plays along because they couldn't get any feed otherwise?

Separately, the Olympics gets special legal protection for their IP [1]. The IoC is giving us the middle finger so we should give it right back and repeal this law. Even better, legalize piracy of any sports broadcast which is supposed to be freely available but isn't.

[1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1995/32

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 don't have satellite tv. I just watch with an antenna/locast. It's not really clear what I get with a peacock sub though, that might work?

Sign up for a ten-day (or maybe it's one week?) Hulu trial. Then you can use that as your login. If that doesn't last long enough you might be able to find another online service (Sling?) that will work without payment for a short time. (Or you could spend $20 on one month of Hulu.)

If you insist on OTA, I don't know what to tell you. Broadcast TV has always sucked. It still sucks now. NBC might be the worst of the big 3.5 networks, but normal households have had cable subscriptions for about four decades now. Those who don't want to watch the Today Shitshow version of the Olympics don't really have to.

> I'm not sure what else we expect NBC to do here.

Not tie it up with a Dish network subscription?

NBC (or rather Comcast) wants to get paid from all sides, advertisers, TV channel distributors, online streamers. That is why there is no banner on their website saying “pay $x and stream whatever Olympic event you want with NBC website/app”.

Actually, the answer to the thread title’s question is the fact that Comcast does not want to be reduced to a dumb pipe whose pricing can be easily compared to others.

I also don't believe in "intellectual property", but in a legal regime that isn't so enlightened it isn't surprising that we have to go to some small amount of trouble and pay some small amount of money to see non-shit coverage of a ridiculously costly sporting event.

It has nothing to do with intellectual property or a less enlightened legal regime. It is just a dying legacy business that has been obviated by the internet trying to milk whatever they can before they are gone.

Yeah, sure, we all wish we were living in the future. In the meantime, someone has to pay for the cameras and streaming. I agree that no one should pay for some of the "personalities" involved in some of the NBC coverage. You've implied that the currently available terms of payment are not appealing to you. However, lots of real people still have subscriptions to cable, satellite, Hulu, Sling, etc.

The only way we get to the future is if sufficient people stop rewarding the unnecessary middlemen. I am just trying to do my part.

Olympics is already on thin ice. Everyone involved is losing big money on it this time around, and the locals are in revolt. If they can't find more cities foolish enough to host, Olympics will be toast. Future host cities will demand more money from networks up-front. At some point they're just going to drop the whole thing and fill the airtime with minor league women's soccer or rollerblade lacrosse or something.

Sure, Olympics started without television networks and it could continue without them, broadcasting over YouTube or whatever. However the show would be very different. We'd still have track and field, but basketball would be played without pros, many fewer "weird" sports and many fewer events in some of the overdone sports like swimming. Which could be OK...

This is just the reality of sports in America today. As a non-cable subscriber who likes hockey, every year I have to jump through numerous hoops to watch the playoffs, not to mention blacked out games. I am hopeful that once revenue from cable drops enough, all these shenanigans will go away.

Dude that is what I find the most annoying. Like, there is equestrian competitors, bike races, all kinds of crazy stuff.

Nope. Swimming and gymnastics. And for winter it is 80% Figure skating with a dash of ski and snowboard.

Have you changed the channel? USA Network and NBC Sports network are 24x7 obscure Olympics, as is CNBC nights and weekends. Judo, women's weightlifting, the men's bike road race, badminton, ping pong, handball...

Is it crappy 25fps progressive scan like most of those streaming apps?

I just can't bear to watch sports at 25fps, it's like watching a slideshow.

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.

Advertising ruins everything.

You've misspelled it. It should be "runs".

Why can't we have both?

Both are true. In the sense that advertising guts out any communications medium it touches, and animates the carcass. It's like a zombie virus.

Yes, and I wish they'd leave and stop screwing up all the stuff I care about.

But they can’t even get a feed with ads to people. I should have been able to get the NBC “live” Olympics feeds on Peacock or one of the other NBC apps at the broadcast times. Nope. Not even with ads. No dice. Cord-cutters are SOL (if you don’t want to put up an antenna or don’t have local NBC reception).

This is how you handle the Olympics if you want the ratings to nosedive.

This is how Comcast wants it -- they're still a cable company, and even though they've started pushing online, they're still a cable company first and foremost. They don't want to sell you a $20 pass to the Olympics or even a $20/mo subscription to Peacock; they want to sell you a $150/mo triple play and $20/mo home security system add-on (that may or may not actually function), because the company seemingly still thinks it's 2006 and there's nothing better.

Can't you just get a peacock subscription for $5-10/mo?

Lol, advertising is the only reason the Olympics are even possible to exist

Then it should stop existing.

Don't you think that's a bit selfish... to suggest eliminating the opportunity for thousands of athletes to fulfill a lifelong dream, just because you personally don't approve of advertising?

Can we open source the Olympics?

No. The Olympics are a commercial operation owned by the IOC. NBC has sole US broadcasting rights until 2032.

What would this even mean?

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.

I guess you'll never please everyone.

With the internet, you can please everyone.

Search, pay, click, watch whatever you want.

That's not true at all. There's literally no way for many Americans to find live or recorded events for free or to pay. NBC has blocked it off.

I am saying it is technologically possible. In the US, I simply do not watch sports as it all requires buying a subscription to an archaic and obviated cable/satellite TV service.

Once I can go to the sports league’s website and and pay directly for what I want to watch, I will start watching.

Just discovered I can in theory use Youtube TV. The offer being submitted is to sign up for a year. So I stand corrected.

NBC has held Olympics hostage worldwide. The whole reason, Olympics are during hottest muggiest time of year in Tokyo (Jul/Aug) because NBC/Comcast didn’t want Olympics during Football season. Previously (1964), Olympics were held in October during more temperate weather in Tokyo.

Most countries broadcast focus on their own athletes. There is wall to wall coverage of Japanese athletes on Japanese TV too right now.

That’s very depressing info, thanks

All I want to enjoy the olympics is a schedule of events in my local time and the ability to watch said events LIVE if I choose to.

I tried searching for this when the olympics started and I gave up entirely.

Is there any ability to get this?

nbc's website has both of those, thats what i've been using anyway

It is not clear to me that even paying for the online streaming option gives you the ability to watch any Olympic event at any time. I assume NBC does not want to give away everything online without a subscription to a cable/satellite TV provider, hence the obfuscation.

https://www.peacocktv.com/sports/olympics

> Can I watch the entire Tokyo Olympics on Peacock, including Opening and Closing Ceremonies?

>Peacock will show Tokyo Olympics highlights, including must-see moments from the Opening and Closing Ceremonies on NBC, as well as original documentaries, series, and specials. To watch more extensive coverage, such as the full Opening Ceremony, please tune in to the live broadcast on NBC.

> Live coverage, highlights, and commentary will also be available on the NBC App, NBCSN, the NBC Sports App, NBC's Tokyo 2020 Olympics App for TV, Olympics Channel: Home of Team USA, NBCOlympics.com, CNBC, GOLF Channel, and on the USA Network.

> *Only available for select providers. Call your cable company to see if you have access.

Ah yeah it could be clearer I suppose, fwiw just using NBCOlympics.com and signing in with youtube tv (which I share with the rest of my fam.) is what I've been doing; I've heard of others using a ~$10/mo promo on sling and using that as a cable provider

all in all it's still better than trying to fight nba/mlb blackouts, where no matter who and what you pay you end up having to watch pirate streams (which also exist for tokyo2020)

>> Can I watch the entire Tokyo Olympics on Peacock, including Opening and Closing Ceremonies?

No. Between Peacock and the NBC "family" of channels (NBC, USA, NBCSN), I can see a fair amount. That included the opening ceremony live and repeated in prime time.

Peacock does not have everything. It also has a screwed up schedule. (For example, looking for the replay of the women's cycling road race, it says it was earlier today, 26 July, when it was actually yesterday.)

Even worse, when watching a "replay" of an event, it will switch to something else. (I was watching a replay of the Japan-USA women's water polo match and it switched over to softball, twice.)

Peacock did have good Tour de France coverage; so, they know how to do some things right. I don't know why they dropped the ball on the Olympics.

An Australian VPN and 7plus is the closest you'll get.

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.

> 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.

I assume it would expose true numbers to advertisers, and lower the price of NBC’s ad spots.

Yeah even watching gymnastics last night, they pretty much only show US competitors. At least with swimming they were forced to show other countries.

Even in events where they are forced, by the nature of the event, to show competitors from non-US countries, the announcers spend the entire event fawning all over the US competitors without pause or silence. While a non-US athlete is up there setting a new world record, NBC aims the camera at the US guy and says things like "It's a race for bronze, folks!"

yeah, I watched a swimming heat where the announcer was speaking as if it were even possible for the US swimmer to win and they got like 5th.

NBC Olympic coverage is not great, but it was even far worse in the past. You may remember from a few Olympics ago that coverage was loaded with “human interest” back stories and the broadcast would actually show very little sports. The other day to my complete surprise, I watched archery Netherlands vs South Korea. No American jingoism in sight. It was quite refreshing. The broadcast is still US-centric, but I am seeing a bit more diversity than in the past. Of course, if I had the choice, I would watch the Olympic broadcast from another country.

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.

Which site would that be? I am not sure what you are hinting at? Sounds really useful.

It's in the blog post, I was quoting from it: stream.nbcolympics.com

Where is that site?

It's in the blog post, I was quoting from it: stream.nbcolympics.com

In Canada, it's on CBC and tsn networks.

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.

I wish google would buy the American rights and put it onto YouTube. 4K video for everything. High frame rates. You name it.

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.

Twitch does have an Apple TV app, but they support fewer devices than YouTube and they top out at 1080p60 SDR.

If Google could just buy the Olympics that’d be great. Apparently global revenue is only a few billion dollars, so really it could be organized and funded by a single wealthy patron to let the world watch sports together.

Edit: but even if it was just YouTube doing something profitable that would be much better than the current situation with NBC. I guess we’ll check back in 2036.

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.

Just FYI, the pictogram sequence was my favorite part of the opening ceremony.

Find yourself a canadian VPN endpoint and check out the CBC coverage (website or "Gem" app). It's pretty complete and much more accessible.

23 hours a day! And lots of live - of that's the middle of the night in USA/Canada

FWIW, Amazon Prime Video in Canada also has the CBC coverage for free. Not quite sure what the value add is though.

We also watch on the CBC Gem Apple TV app. It seems to have everything we want... live events, replay events, "PrimeTime" coverage where they switch between popular events with commentators. We even watched USA vs ROC men's indoor volleyball last night. There were no commentators, just the live feed of the match. It was odd to listen to an empty gym with no commentary but at least we were able to watch.

I've had similar frustrations to the author.

We tried watching the broadcast coverage. Though I didn't time it, it felt like 60% advertising. This sounds hyperbolic, but it was really blocks of ads interspersed with highlights of events and (awful) commentary the majority of the time, and then occasional full events focused on very specific sports (swimming and gymnastics). I was shocked by how bad it was.

So, wanting to watch actual events, we paid for NBC's online service. It's an incoherent mess with login loops, and it still doesn't seem to include links to many of the full events, just the same highlight reels. It may be there, but after 20 minutes of searching we just gave up.

NBC has butchered this event.

Honestly I cannot agree more. NBC is garbage and the olympics should be the one event in the world that is all access and all rights.

I cannot even find a video recap of the Tunisian swimmer winning.

On the modern Olympics: it helps to remember that it is now an advertising event that happens to have sports competitions.

There's so many ethical problems constantly overshadowing the Olympics that it's hard for me to enjoy watching them. I have some excitement for the athletes but no longer make a point of watching them. It's a shame because it's a good idea, but there's a lot if changes that need to happened; coverage is just the tip of the iceberg.

Not so. You're 20+ years late for that. When you require viewers to create accounts with individual identity, you've gone beyond advertising. Of course you might argue that the modern ad industry has evolved beyond advertising. We have just failed to relabel it.

I'm so done with the f-ing Olympics. They're just a vast marketing scam that countries and cities buy into -- often acting against the wishes of their own people. The cities that host them see more negative impact than positive; and, frankly, the coverage is boring.

After the last fiasco in Brazil, I was hoping it would drive a spike into the heart of the old relic -- maybe the tremendous loss on the investments in Tokyo will help it end . The summer games are the only ones any mass audience really cares about anymore, true?

> The summer games are the only ones any mass audience really cares about anymore, true?

Not if you're in a wintry country.

2018 super g was an amazing contest, I was able to download it after the fact, very enjoyable, from what I read it wasn't very good live.

Hoping the olympics just goes away. Now it's all hyper scientifically prepped professionals competing to get attention in between ads on some idiotic exclusive network. College football is about to become the same thing. No more thrill of victory or agony of defeat, just filler to sell more toilet paper or something.

> College football is about to become the same thing.

It's a crime that a game between 2 not top 25 teams that run the clock takes 4 hours in a brutal September 12pm game; just so that commercials can play.

College football has been that for about 20 years. The rich got richer, the Saturdays got less interesting, the players got the short end.

It's somewhat baffling that all the also-ran schools have such strong fanbases still - it's so stacked against them, moreso than in any other league.

"...about to..."? What happened to cause this new thing? Do you mean that some of the people who work their asses off and destroy their health in order to generate all the money will get a tiny share of that money? Don't worry there will still be plenty of money left over for Dabo!

> just filler to sell more toilet paper or something

This has also bothered me, all the ads I get are toilet paper and insurance. I don’t feel the least bit influenced by them but they must spend gobs of money to make sure I know their name.

Funny that it's an advertising event that I can't watch. I see ads when I watch something. They have made it impossible for me to watch. Ergo, I am not being advertised to. Good job everyone, we did it!

Remember the good ol' days when you waited for the results to get published in the newspaper? They're back.

The question is why is it so hard to watch the Olympics now that you can't watch it live. It should be as easy as going to a URL and pick what you want to watch.

So much this. Fencing was only played once at 5am EST. Finding somewhere to watch recordings is impossible.

I downloaded the gold metal match from youtube because seemed like an interesting story, the video was very incomplete. It would have been cool to see the entire match.

I'm using Stremium with Locast. Stremium is a cloud-based DVR service that can take in and record other services like Locast. Still pretty new, and there are occasional bugs, but it's working well for me. Stremium is $5/month for 50 hours of DVR storage and another $5/month for Locast to turn off the subscription nags. Works on Web, Android, AndroidTV, FireTV, and Roku.

It's especially difficult to watch without paying. Over the air (or locast) is about the only option but that only provides highlights or coverage of shorter events. No broadcasting of football.

There was supposed to be a free tier on Peacock but everything I've seen, outside of 2-4 minute clips, requires Peacock Premium.

Yes, and my experience with the <10 minute clips I did try to watch on Peacock turned me off from the service and the games in general.

It really is a mess. I subscribed to Peacock to watch the Tour de France and planned to the cancel when it was finished. The TdF coverage was good, so I decided I would keep the subscription to watch Olympic events. I wanted to watch USWNT last Saturday morning so I startup Peacock and find out it is not available on Peacock. I do some googling and find out it is on NBC Sports Network. I install NBCSN app and discover I can watch 30 minutes of the game until I must pay to join NBCSN. I gave up, deleted NBCSN and canceled Peacock. As you mention the <10 minutes clips are frustrating. On top of that, I didn't see anything that was streaming live. All of the content was 'Replay on date/time' at least 24 hours after the results were already in.

This cool invention called "cable tv" would have let you watch the entire Tour and women's soccer and you wouldn't even have to download any apps!

Cable TV doesn't play every event: it can't, they overlap

Who said it did? He mentioned the Tour de France, and US Women's Soccer. Both extensively covered.

However... if he did have a cable subscription, he could have logged into the NBC Sports Network's app and not be stuck with a 30 minute limit. That app seems to have just about everything -- you want 5+ hours of preliminary badminton matches? They've got you. Want Serbia vs Kazakhstan water polo? Done. Can't wait for the archery finals? The entire round of 64 is live streaming.

Even once you find the thing you want to watch, actually watching it on NBC streaming has been a miserable experience. Moving the mouse anywhere over the entire broadcast window brings up video controls along the bottom of the screen, which take 5+ seconds to fade after you stop moving. These controls are very opaque, and obscure the bottom 10th or so of the video. This tends to block things like athlete names/countries, timers, scores, etc. Ads play, but do not pause the underlying broadcast. They will interrupt commentators mid-sentence, and will return to the broadcast in the middle of actual competition (for example, they might try to sneak an ad in between Badminton points, but the ad is longer than the intra-point break).

At least it's all in one place. Watching MLS has a huge pain because games are seemingly randomly split between Fox and ESPN and it's a crapshoot which streaming service we need to use each week to watch our team play

I would happily pay someone on the order of $100 to stream a season of MLS at broadcast quality, more if it means less ads.

While stadiums were empty they digitally overlaid ads on the empty seats really poorly so that it didn't quite track camera motion and the ball would just disappear behind the ads whenever it was up in the air. Thanks to exclusivity deals and region locking, I can't just choose a different service when the only product available is garbage.

I’ve found that if you sign up for a month of YouTube tv and then use the nbc olympics app, it’s a pretty decent experience. Oh and then you also need peacock to watch some basketball games

At first I tried sling but they didn’t have the full family of nbc networks

Discovery is the network broadcasting the Olympics here in Sweden, and they're doing an awful job as well. Especially the app is useless, with very annoying compression artifacts all over feeds with panning camera shots or even medium paced action. Trying to watch the new surfing event with all the white foam and waves was an exercise in patience for sure.

But the thing that really drives me up the walls is that the commentator feed on some (maybe all?) events is a second or so too early. The new skateboarding events were completely ruined by hearing the commentators reacting to falls etc, a second or so before you actually see it.

Having watched a bunch over the weekend, my opinion is it feels very 20th century. It's about what you'd expect from a TV broadcast and not much more. Had me wishing that it was broadcast on Twitch or Youtube instead.

Not to mention that NBC not showing the proper flag for Taiwan as they reached third place overall gold medals.

I’ve got better things to do than to watch state-sponsored selective narratives.

That's a condition of Taiwan entering the Olympics at all.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/taiwan-chinese-taipei...

I wonder, whilst looking at Hong Kong, why Taiwan would be at all worried about the One Country, Two Systems rule...

Truly shows how oppressive Mainland China government has become.

> Truly shows how oppressive Mainland China government has become.

Or rather how much power they have to force their views internationally, even when those views are objectively unreasonable.

Here's another recent example: https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/fast-furious-star-john-cen...

Their tentacles are everywhere.

https://freebeacon.com/media/nyt-quietly-scrubs-chinese-prop...

“Has become”? That’s international standard until Taiwan truly declares independence. Quote Wikipedia:

This dissension eventually came to a compromise when the term "Chinese Taipei" was first proposed in the Nagoya Resolution in 1979, whereby the ROC/Taiwan and the PRC/China recognize the right of participation to each other and remain as separate teams in any activities of the International Olympic Committee and its correlates. This term came into official in 1981 following a name change of Olympic Committee of the ROC to Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee.

Edit: great job downvoting when it doesn’t fit your narrative

> “Has become”? That’s international standard until Taiwan truly declares independence. Quote Wikipedia:

If Taiwan does declare independence, the PRC will start a war over it about 5 minutes later. Or at least there's a high enough chance of a bloody, crippling (for Taiwan) war that a declaration would be foolish, even if it's what Taiwan really wants.

Citing one of the many compromises made because of that fact doesn't really justify the situation.

China might be tougher recently but the this compromise was made years ago when China was weak and poor. In any way it’s a complicated 40+ years matter that has nothing to do with what China does recently.

> China might be tougher recently but the this compromise was made years ago when China was weak and poor. In any way it’s a complicated 40+ years matter that has nothing to do with what China does recently.

The PRC has been poor, but it's never been weak. Remember: it fought the US and its allies to a standstill in the 50s.

And this "compromise" was made when China was on the upswing and was beginning to have the ability to force the international isolation of Taiwan.

I'm miffed that paulg publicly posts criticisms of the CCP, yet it's gotten my account flagged on HN for posting the same things about a half dozen times. Sometimes just questions about what people think the long term outcome will be.

The desire is to keep this type of conversation off of HN (flamewar and politics), and admittedly sometimes my tone descends to that level, but it's frustrating that I have kept my mouth shut about the CCP and still have my posts severely rate limited.

I think I can make six posts a day? Or if I say something that gets downvoted - eg. critical of Google, Apple, Facebook, monopolies, etc. I find my posting restricted almost immediately.

And here's Paul posting repeatedly in the same tone about Xi, the CCP, etc.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1418662122930724869?s=19

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1419367325556432905?s=19

Etc.

Frustrating.

Tech is willing to silence itself and its workers for profit.

I'd wager that the "complaining about downvotes generates downvotes" effect is a bigger cause at this point.

We have a phrase for that: “Streisand Effect”.

That’s when people want to see something you’re trying to hide. The downvote effect is when your content is hidden because you want it to be seen. So I might dub it the Anti-Streisand effect.

No, I get that. But I'm pretty confident that this is a flag on my account.

I frequently see "you're posting too fast. please slow down. thanks", even when my posts are 100% upvoted.

"Too fast" can be a handful of posts in a single day. I'm probably close to my limit now that I'm responding to you. I'll have to wait another day before I can post again.

I think it also negatively weights my comments, though I don't have evidence yet.

This flag was placed on my account for the reasons I stated above. I'm not going to mention it anymore because I don't want to get in any more trouble with the mods, but I find it unfortunate that pg can have the freedom to speak up against fascism whereas we cannot.

I've had really good essays on biochemistry topics, finance, and machine learning that I've ultimately had to discard because of this.

He doesn't post here anymore (username pg) and multiple times on his Twitter feed has critiqued the current (?) users of HN beings angry at everything and all the time privileged Californians. Tons of stuff he tweets in general is not kosher here anyway.

You can easily find a lot that stuff, use twitters search. I doubt he cares who posts here or what's going on, he moved on.

I was incredibly confused this year by Russia being "ROC" and Taiwan being "Chinese Taipei", given I'd always mentally associated "ROC" with Republic of China aka Taiwan.

Russia cheated with steroids / doping at a state level. So Russia itself was banned from the Olympics (their flag, their anthem, etc. etc.)

The athletes shouldn't be punished however, so the athletes are allowed to get together to make their own group. At least, the 2021 athletes are not the same athletes who cheated years ago, so we should give them a chance at the world stage.

Flying under the Olympic flag under a "not Russia" name is a good compromise IMO. It publicizes the cheat while still allowing the athletes to compete.

Nevertheless, I think we can all agree that the olympics should have picked a less confusing acronym for the Russian athletes.

If a country cheats in the Olympics, who should be punished by the IOC then if they cannot ban the athletes?

I think it was worth it for Russia to cheat in the Sochi Olympics. There doesn't seem to be any significant consequence from their violations.

The 11 athletes who cheated at Sochi were banned for life from all Olympic events. The issue is that Russia as a state cheated as well, so its a bit difficult to figure out a proper punishment.

They just didn't want to ban the new generation of athletes. A lot of these kids are just 19 years old (aka: they were 13 years old at Sochi). I think banning the cheaters, but not the "next generation" is a good plan.

They shouldn’t have let them wear the uniforms they chose though. The uniforms are clearly the Russian flag and you see it in warmups and the medal ceremonies.

This confused me as well. I was aware of all the doping but didn’t realize Russia was competing as ROC this year and was shocked that Taiwan was no longer forced to call themselves Chinese Taipei. Then I saw the Chinese Taipei team and thought maybe ROC was the Refugee Olympic Committee and was pleasantly surprised at how well they were doing in non-marathon events.

Only after I searched did I realize ROC is just Russia.

It’s not NBC, it’s the olympics, and it’s been like this for years as part of a compromise that makes everyone unhappy except the athletes who might otherwise not get to compete at all.

Taiwan isn't an officially recognised country, being the successor to the entity that was defeated in the Chinese Civil war. Both them and the other entity, the Chinese Communists, ( PRC) claim full sovereignty over the entirety of Chinese territory, including the island of Taiwan ( formerly Formosa). Almost every country in the world, and the UN, recognise the PRC as the singular China.

One day Taiwan should be recognised as its own independent and separate country due to reality, but the PRC is highly unlikely to allow that anytime soon.

As the last person in America with an antenna, I will note that their broadcast coverage is pretty much exactly what it has always been through the years. You turn it on and watch it.

Lol yep, it was not very difficult to tune into NBC and watch, though it was a little swimming and gymnastics heavy. I understand why, but would have preferred like 10% less, maybe just highlights from some other sports, or maybe having triathlon come on like 5 minutes earlier.

The OTA broadcast is fine if you want to watch exactly what they want to show. But there’s tons of other, arguably more interesting, events as well.

It’s not fine.

They split the screen last night into commercial and B-roll event (the athletes getting ready, warms ups, etc).

So 60% of the screen was commercial, 40% was something you would normally see with commentators talking about past performance, other athletes besides the USA, etc.

Nope, instead, we’ll just show more commercials even though we just came back from commercial break!

Sure, you might be happy with the coverage they do, but I'm sure you could understand that not everyone is. There is no real reason that you cannot watch the events you want to watch - when you want to watch it - instead of whatever is playing on air when you can be at home to watch. You know, assuming you have the internet to do so.

I know a lot of people with antennas. I have Sling TV but I also have an antenna and an HD HomeRun dual TV tuner. I can record from the HD HomeRun tuner to my computer or I can connect to it from my Nvidia Shield set top boxes and watch it live.

There are a few alternate channels that NBC also basically controls. They show reruns of Bonanza and stuff. Is there some reason they can't have alternate olympics coverage on that??

I have an antenna as well. I was really hoping my NBC affiliate would use their other broadcast channels (4.1, 4.2, 4.3, etc) to show other Olympic sports. The promise of digital broadcasting. Nope, just more reruns from the 1980s.

I only recall this happening once, when WRAL (then a CBS affiliate) did that for the March Madness NCAA Men's tournament 10-15 years ago. Later tournaments had sold off the rights to some of the games to cable networks, so they were unable to do it again.

Parent firm Comcast sets the bar for abject trash customer care; given NBC was never well managed for at least the last 15-20 years, its surviving on a back catalog of content, and periodic strangle holds on stuff like the Olympics, which it strip-mines for ad rev.

I want to plug locast. They are not huge yet, but basically provide a streaming equivalent of broadcast TV, letting you stream your local broadcast instead of needing an antenna. With how flaky antennas are it's an awesome service, and a non-profit.

Between US (NBC), Canada (CBC), and the UK (BBC), Canada’s CBC site seems the best. I’m still disappointed at the number of replays not available. Does anyone know of a country with better coverage to VPN into?

Wish there's a premium service directly from the Olympics where you can select the sport and match to want to watch.

This doesn't seem to cover even half of the event: https://www.cbc.ca/player/sports/olympics/replays

I love following taekwondo and I've just given up trying to use NBC's website and just get a VPN to the BBC version. I'll have to see if that works this year or not.

What I like about NBC Olympic broadcasts is when they cut to shots of Bode Miller's girlfriend at the bottom of the mountain every few seconds. Great stuff.

"/s" detected.

This is what's wrong with most US media: it's insufficient to portray X for its own value, a spackling of drama must be applied on top and that must take priority over X.

And pathos; don't forget the pathos!

Not exactly what they mean but this helps:

https://nbcolympics.com/schedule

Convention and event sites are generally very bad.

In the age of Google, it's hard to find out when something is happening and to get the most relevant details, especially viewing options.

This is a kind of UX experience that transcends an individual entity. I think a lack of standards and means to merge information (i.e. TV schedules for each nation) is a problem.

Having really good APIs and data standards across the board would help aka event times, locations, geocoridnates, relevant links, you could practically build you own ux on top of that.

man so much whinging. This guy is not the target market and clearly NBC only half-cares but is in a position to do so and the eyeballs they get from the "home at 5PM, turn on feed and leave it running til 11PM" is enough for the advertisers and the operation on a nightly. This is likely how it's been for 20 years so this is nothing new.

How is this 'so much whinging? He clearly explains what his pain is and also adds the fact that maybe NBC did not optimize for him. He further adds that even for the people NBC is optimizing for, he thinks (his own opinion) that those people might not be best served by this approach.

Honestly NBC hasn't been good at presenting the Olympics since 1976. That's probably the last time it was worth watching!

Best experience watching the Olympics: a hotel lobby in England. Complete coverage, no chatter, no delays, and no commercials.

BBC have lost the rights this year, sadly. They can only show a few things and Discovery have the majority of them, so I and am pretty sure many people I know will not be watching.

I think the BBC can only show 2 live events at a time, unlike the previous 2 Olympics where they had amazing live coverage of pretty much every event.

Can't help feeling this is a very very short-sighted move by the IOC (selling the European rights to Discovery), and will further dimish the prestige of the Games.

Agreed! A key thing that I don't think they realised is that the free to air rights across Europe always created an intrigue among the population that fed into the youth. No matter the background of a child in the UK, for instance, they would typically have completely free access to damn near every Olympic event.

That's gone now, and that's really sad.

International coverage is lightyears better than US.

My coach was saying she preferred the tell-it-like-it-is British commentary ("That's a devastating defeat for the xxx who has been improving and really expected to place") to the candied-up American commentary ("all that work paid off for yyy")

If you have youtubetv, you can watch and record everything with the push of a button.

By far the easiest option is to use your VPN to watch the Olympics on the CBC.

As a german what is being described here seems crazy, we have to pay taxes which pay for state financed Independent media and it is also required that all important sporting events can not be behind paywalls. You can watch a germany focused broadcast of the olympics all day with minimal ads which only play maybe every hour or you can watch live streams of all events online or trough their app. Most streams also have dedicated commentators that seem reasonably knowledgable about the sports and have quite extensive background knowledge about the athletes and the last years in the sport. It has honestly been a blast watching all kinds of events i would never watch and having someone who is really in to it take you along for the ride

Is there any way to watch a replay of German coverage by sport? I've been looking but I can't find anything :(

sports is all wrapped up in exclusive contracts brokered by these media guys who are all buddies. you wanna watch international sports you gotta get a euro VPN because in the USA our rich power brokers dont care about most sport.

Who cares about the olympics? Seriously, who is watching this? Who is the target market?

I for one enjoy watching it. A bunch of people I know like to watch it too (and they don't really "do" sports normally).

At least in the UK, it gets prime-time billing on one of the major BBC channels.

Lot's of people. Just because you may not care about sports doesnt mean massive amounts of people around the world don't. Several countries will win their first gold this year. That's a national achievement. Several sports will be included for the first time this year. That is a whole set of people who get to see their favorite hobby included in the games. Many new world records will be set which is an example of technology, humans, and science all working together to achieve things thought impossible before.

Many people care about the Olympics for many reasons.

Worth $20 billion though? with what will end up being completely wasted resources/buildings etc by August? No olympic venue has actually done any where near the amount of good and improvement to a city anywhere near the cost.

Sure. Could we spend that $20 billion better every four years? Absolutely. Would we? Not a chance.

I'm not a sports person at all but every two years, my wife and I watch tons of Olympics. It's really weird for us since I probably watch 1 hour of sports per year but during the Olympics (Winter and Summer), we will sit down and watch 3 - 5 hours each day. Sports that we have no interest in outside of the Olympics.

TFA is not well-informed. Maybe the NBC people should have better marketing, but the Olympics coverage is not terrible. If you have a basic cable or satellite package, you can sign into this app:

https://channelstore.roku.com/search/nbc+sports

Presumably some of the lesser TV appliances also have a similar app. If you don't subscribe to a basic pay TV package, maybe you could do a trial subscription to Hulu or something and sign in with that. With this app, one can watch the entirety of live and recorded events. Many of the live feeds will have "down time" between matches, rounds, etc. There are ads, which are especially annoying for "one-at-a-time" individual events like whitewater canoe slalom. I suspect it would be possible to pi-hole the ads.

In my view, if a tech-savvy person putting significant effort in still can't find a way to view the coverage, even if they have a subscription, NBC is doing a poor job.

Searching for an app that lots of people already have installed doesn't seem like "significant effort" to me. If people don't want help or advice with this I don't see the point of this thread.

It's not as simple as searching for an app. It's knowing which app to search for, and how to get access to it. When I looked this up over the weekend I came across multiple answers pointing me in the direction NBC, Peacock, Hulu, and YouTube TV. Google "where to watch the olympics", and I see three options just from NBC (NBC, Peacock, and NBC Olympics) followed by list of content farm articles. Even if you manage to get access, the app is organized poorly and makes it difficult to find the content you want.

Even if you manage to get access, the app is organized poorly and makes it difficult to find the content you want.

No argument with this. UI for short-lived events sucks, in general. Still, my elderly parents can use it. I'm not sure what people ITT want. I posted a simple solution for doing what TFA claims can't be done. For my trouble, I got downvoted to oblivion. I don't care about internet points, but if it hadn't been so downvoted there might have been a chance someone who genuinely wanted to watch Olympics might have seen it and been helped. I think maybe some other people just want to complain.

Indeed. I installed half a dozen apps on my Ipad to figure out which one actually was the correct one.

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