True.

I find their coverage lacking this year. In fact, I think it has been slipping every Olympics following their excellent coverage of the Sydney games.

Apparently, they got really good ratings for the Hockey on CBC in 2002 so now they have each Canadian Men's Hockey game on 3 times a day. Hockey's okay and everything, and I understand it is a Canadian network, but I'd rather see sports that I can't see everyday. It is especially disappointing when I stay up way too late to try to catch the morning events and get the previous day's Hockey crap.

Hey, those Knight Riders are great! It's that or Sci Fi for me, and I just can't watch SD signals. Well, except Queer Eye.

Ratings are taking a bit of a hit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/sp...rtner=homepage

Several ESPN radio and TV hosts have openly wondered if the issue of tape delaying the important events has caused serious downfalls in ratings. This is especially true in the Internet age, where anyone with Internet access can get results long before NBC shows them on TV.

Sad to say, I think if Disney had the rights to the Olympics they could have used not only ABC, but ESPN, ESPN2 and possibly the ABC Family Channel to show events live regardless of time of day. ABC could then show their prime-time package as a "compilation" of events of the day--maybe three hours a night. Besides, ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 could use it to showcase HD broadcasts live, too.

Tape-delaying is not the reason. Tape-delaying coverage has been going for decades. I think ratings are down for 2 reasons: the other networks have finally decided to go on the offensive and schedule their strong shows against the Olympics instead of conceding defeat. Second, I think this new figure skating (the event where women tune in in droves) scoring system is a turn-off for many viewers.

I said before - you'll never see live coverage of the big events during the day because the network (no matter who has the rights) will not want to dilute their prime-time menu.

You know what I hate? All the new weirdo combo sports. I watched the moguls one where they have to do two jumps. How stupid is that. You get a score for your jump which is based on subjectiveness, and a score for your time. That seems stupid. Why not have them make an oragami swan at the bottom of the race, judge it, and combine that score as well?

If NBC would tell me the exact time and length of when an event is running, I would watch it, if I knew Alpine racing was from 9pm - 10pm and all racing and medals would be won during that time, I would watch or at least DVR it, but they stretch it out over 5 hours, who's got that kinda time to burn on trying to find some sports interest in this mess of a production.

I call it the made-for-DVR Olympics.

Yep. I just TiVo it all and then watch what I want. My viewing habits are all screwed up right now. Because of the seeming mandate from Disney to spoil the Olympics on every show they own, I'm having to watch PTI at 1am, which really sucks.

das

To follow up on the figure skating - maybe it's just me but I think NBC is chopping up the event coverage more than they ever have before. Wasn't the Men's Free Skate shown in at least 4 different blocks last night? Not to mention, it didn't end until after 11 pm. This is bound to turn off viewers.

I have to agree that the coverage shown on NBC, especially on primetime, is horrible.

But, I loved staring at the female component to the US team in Ice Dancing (via HDTV), Tanith Belbin is purty.

No coverage on the network this morning - just their regular old Saturday morning crap.

Then how come I'm seeing coverage on CNBC and USA Network??

Yeah - there is no excuse for that - they could always throw some lesser event up and show it live.

That being said - the Swiss are currently up on the Canadians 1-0 going to the 2nd period on U-HD and you have Curling on USA.

The national network. I'm at home watching my daughter today and I was hoping to watch some Olympic coverage in HD - particularly if it was live. But no.....

You don't get Universal HD? Great hockey game going on.

I still only have Basic cable (due to my internet access) - all of my HD is OTA. I've been putting off my DirecTV purhase for a couple of years - pretty much since the wife got pregnant. But that should change this year. Maybe...

Your HDTV doesn't have a built-in tuner? I can get the cable HD channels QAM/in-the-clear.

It has a built-in-tuner, but the only HD I can receive is OTA. To receive HD cable around here you have to have a digital cable box or a cable card, iirc. And I just have too much of a problem giving charter any more of my money for their meager HD package.

Finally, some Olympic coverage on the network, but it's cross-country skiing until the USA men's hockey game (vs. Slovakia) comes on.

Well, these are the Winter games. The Winter Olympics are not nearly as big as the Summer Olympics, having far fewer events than the summer games. Also, the number of athletes pales in comparison to the number of athletes attending the summer games. The U.S. had the largest team with 211 athletes. Compare that to the team in Greece, and we had well over 450 athletes. Also, consider fewer countries participate for obvious reasons. They have to stretch out the coverage to even make it last the full 16-17 days. That's one reason they keep adding events like Snowboard Cross. Because of that, the coverage is not going to be as big.

I really enjoy watching the winter games, and I don't think the coverage has been all that lackluster in terms of programming (it's on a lot in the night, and I actually have some time to catch some of the events). The actual presentation (especially in HD) is really bad. The compression drives me up the wall. It's pretty great when things are still, but when it starts moving it doesn't look pretty.

I don't know why they bothered with adding Universal HD to my HD package, though, as it has showed very little Olympic coverage. Earlier today, though, I did watch part of the first episode of Quantum Leap in HD, and that was really cool!