Olympics Television Broadcasts : Jim McKay Remembered

The biggest problem with the Olympics television broadcasts over the next couple of weeks is that when you and I see them in the States, the events are long since over, they're history, they're not news they're "olds". While it's true that NBC is offering some events via live streaming online, there's a reason why you have that giant plasma screen TV in your living room - it's to watch TV, not your laptop.

If you lived closer to the Canadian border, you could've watched the opening ceremonies live this morning instead of the packaged and edited and canned and stale re-broadcast of them on NBC over 15 hours later tonight. That kind of accessibility to live broadcast of the games seems to exist in every industrialized nation other than the United States.Let's be clear that it's true that NBC is spreading broadcasts across 9 channels and will have live broadcasts on TV (starting tonight at 11:00pm on CNBC, Boxing Elimination bouts: middleweight and light heavyweight) but we will primarily be subjected to delayed content on the NBC flagship. What will be even more annoying about that content is its over-packaging: the profiles, the soft-focus, the crummy music, the not-to-speak-ill-of-the-dead Jim McKay-ification of sports broadcasting. What we're talking about here is the ridiculous half-hour+ spent on back story and build up followed by 3 minutes of competition.

While there must be a lowest-common-denominator appeal to Jim McKay-ification (or else why would we be beaten over the head by this every 4 years?) there has got to be a significant percentage of the US population that wants the simple immediacy of sports competition without all the bullshit of what town some competitor grew up in and at what tender age they witnessed the death of their dog thus inspiring the competitor to run like the wind or whatever it is that they do. When more time is spent on backstory than on competition, we, the viewers, are shortchanged, and the network does not deserve the time we spend pointing our eyeballs at the ads they present us.