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

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

#281

Post by jollybean »

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.

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

#282

Post by JohnFen »

partiallypro wrote: post #201
standardUser wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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

#283

Post by rufus_foreman »

vernie wrote: post #209
partiallypro wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#284

Post by AtlasBarfed »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #133
legitster wrote: post #55

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 ev…

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.

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

#286

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

h2odragon wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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

#287

Post by dragonwriter »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #286
h2odragon wrote: post #2

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.

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 80…

> 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.

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

#288

Post by TchoBeer »

listenallyall wrote: post #278
cad1 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discove…

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

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

#289

Post by partiallypro »

chungy wrote: post #226
partiallypro wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#290

Post by partiallypro »

vernie wrote: post #209
partiallypro wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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