Why does NBC make it so difficult to watch the Olympics? • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

koolba wrote: post #12

jeffbee wrote: post #3

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.

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!

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

#242

Post by tshaddox » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #166

js2 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#243

Post by ck2 » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

Not exactly what they mean but this helps:

https://nbcolympics.com/schedule

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

#244

Post by mullen » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

downrightmike wrote: post #112

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

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.

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

#245

Post by rewtraw » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

nrjames wrote: post #179

tedajax wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#246

Post by rewtraw » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

dariusj18 wrote: post #14

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 Peaco…

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.

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

#247

Post by asciimov » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

Spare_account wrote: post #199

tedajax wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you don't have cable?

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.

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

#248

Post by scaryclam » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

jazzyjackson wrote: post #173

te_chris wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Eurosp…

But I thought uk left Europe :(

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

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

#249

Post by asciimov » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

loonster wrote: post #139

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 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.

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

#250

Post by mousepilot » Mon, Jul 26, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

spywaregorilla wrote: post #174

eplanit wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 T…

> 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.