Olympic Part 1: TV Coverage

I think our TV has been showing the Olympics about 90% of its on time. (I think I got some non-Olympic shows at the beginning during preliminary stuff and a quick movie tonight). The coverage has been great! Granted, there's some bias this year due to location. But it's amazing how almost 3 channels have been showing Olympics non-stop. You get to watch the obscure events and all the athletes regardless of country! Even when I woke up at 8:30am last Saturday, they were broadcasting live from Vancouver at 5:30am! Funny how many times I heard: "There's the view of Whistler, you can see the village is waking up and heading up the slopes".  Although, they get some points off for the nonsense they have at times, especially when the MTV-equivalent-channel broadcasters would come on.

Maybe I've assimilated ("Resistance is futile". hehe), but I agree with a recent article I read that complains about NBC's coverage in the US. I actually read a different one, but here's one from NPR. They time delay everything, sometimes even more than a minute, and they leave everything for prime-time and skip around too much. I shouldn't be too harsh 'cause I can only see Boston's NBC, two years ago it was half-way around the world, and I probably didn't pay much attention to Winter Olympics before. But come on!!! Not show the finals of the women's figure skating live in California when the event is going on north of you!? Tsk tsk. Was it better in 2002 when it was their home-court advantage? Like I said, I didn't pay much attention to Winter Olympics back then. This year, I've been influenced'cause I married a northerner :) And yes, there's that location bias again. Oh, and the spouse-location bias too. Hehe.

[The article I read before actually made more of an emphasis about how NBC thinks everyone lives in a bubble and won't somehow find out who's won until 8 pm.]

Oh, and at first I thought it was hilarious how NBC would show Ice Dancing instead of the round-robin US-Canada game (Again, I think I've been assimilated!). I always though ice dancing was silly - "who would watch that!?". I take it back. I actually watched the final competition, and wished I could have watched the first two rounds. Actually exciting to watch. I know have respect for them.  Except for those Russians - I can't take them seriously when they dress like that and he looks like "Colin Firth in movies that make fun and overuse the 70's look".  I think really though, I'm a sucker for cute couples with a romantic-comedy-type story:  the Canadian couple who won have been skating since they were 7-9 years old, and "are just friends". If this was a movie, the pressure of the Olympics and winning gold would change that...