Thoughts on the Olympics
I never really spent much time watching the Olympics, but this year I watched it every day, partly because it happened to be in China, partly because only recently have I been able to watch HDTV programming, so watching everything in high definition still seems novel.
- The opening ceremony was very impressive, but why did China have to taint it with the digital doctoring?
- The new gymnastics scoring system is totally broken. Laypeople can’t relate to the scores and have no idea what’s good or bad. This was even worse for the team and all-around competitions since not all gymnasts performed the same exercise at the same time and each exercise had its own baseline for difficulty scores. I also think the difficulty scores get way too much weight. And, of course, the tie-breaking system is a joke.
- The outfits that the U.S. women’s gymnastics team wore made them look like Coca-Cola cans with blond ponytails.
- The linesmen who run up to the javelins and shot-put balls as they’re landing are nuts.
- I think I liked it better when the Summer and Winter Olympics were in the same year. I think having Olympic games every other year is too frequent and takes some of the magic out of it; I remember the 1984 and 1988 games seeming more special. (Of course, that might be because they happened to be the first two that I have any recollection of, and the competition between the two sides of the Iron Curtain heightened some of the drama.) Plus, they got to distract everyone from all the presidential politicking.
- Isn’t this a perfect opportunity for NBC affiliates to do something useful with their other digital subchannels instead of showing around-the-clock HD weather reports?
- Why were events shown live in the Eastern Time Zone (and presumably in the Central Time Zone) but not for the rest of the U.S.? Meanwhile people on the west coast had three extra hours for various newscasters and websites to spoil results for them.
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The time zone difference really sucked. I think the worst part was that NBC would still claim it was live. At least NPR has the decency to say “Don’t call the number!” when it does a repeat of a show.
I also watched a lot of stuff online but stupidly NBC decided that anything it showed on TV didn’t deserve to be online. So I never got to watch any Beach Volleyball except for the US team.
— Anonymous @ September 2, 2008, 11:07 am (PT)
Yeah the anonymous coward was me. Oops.
— David E @ September 2, 2008, 11:07 am (PT)
Have you seen the “Pre-Taped Call In Show” skit from Mr. Show?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrlS9_n8GX4
— James @ September 2, 2008, 2:57 pm (PT)
I dunno. I thought the gymnastic scoring system chagne was reasonable and was overly criticized. It seems standard in most sports (like Diving and such use it), and the previous perfect-10 had so much subjective bias. And much depended on order. Tie breaking as well. So sure, there is still subjective bias, but at least it is more clear where the score is coming from.
I agree, the novelty of HD is still cool. And the opening ceremonies really is the first one that impressed me. Partly cause I’m older, partly because technology has come a long way.
NBC used their other channels (not as much as I had hoped) but still a fair amount. Universal HD had constant coverage, and you could watch events on CNBC, USA, Oxygen, etc. Those weren’t HD though. Does NBC have other HD channels? Oh, probably there was stuff on telemundo, but I figured, would skip the spanish.
Oh didn’t realize you guys didn’t get it live. That’s dumb. Don’t see why not. Much of the gymnastics events happened at like 11 or midnight, right in primetime on the west coast.
And the online stuff was awesome. Got to watch handball, (cool) and skeet shooting (boring, they never miss, the scores were like 137/140) But as to David’s point, you could watch everything that was on TV online as well. There was a what’s on TV stream on the website.
— Ben @ September 4, 2008, 9:56 pm (PT)