Our household was very disappointed with the broadcasting of the Olympics in Beijing. The games themselves seemed very good and there were some pretty good events like the 100M and 200M dominiation by Usain Bolt. It’s the broadcasters we loathe.
Sonia (and I agree with her) was very disappointed in what NBC and CBC (and TSN I guess, but who cares about them since they only were able to show basketball and boxing. Whoppeee!) were broadcasting, particularly in prime time. Of the most irritating things: why did they have to spend about 40% of their broadcast time showing profiles on Olympians and docucrap on China? My god, we can do this ourselves on the internet. So, add in commercials and of the ‘billion’ of hours of broadcasting, about 25% was actually devoted to showing the events themselves. And that leads to aggravating point number 2: they were often showing stuff that we just didn’t care to watch. IN PARTICULAR: BEACH VOLLEYBALL. Man, this made up hokey sport for drunken teens to play on spring break shouldn’t even be in the Olympics (nor should a lot of other events like syncro swimming. Table tennis can stay but it should be officially renamed to ping-pong). If you add the amount of time CBC spent on Beach Volleyball, now were down to about 18-20% of the broadcasting time was spent on anything remotely interesting. And get this: Canada didn’t even have any entrants in Beach Volleyball that would have garnered any real interest! But I guess that could be said for pretty much every event (Bah-dum!)
So, grow up you silly excuse for a ‘national’ television station and start using TV a little better. Start getting the real guns involved like Rogers and start offering multiple On-Demand options so that I can watch what event I want, when I want. Boy, I was Jonesing for some badminton or archery, you know, stuff I never see outside of the Olympics but not once did I catch any of that. And don’t give me that ‘how do we make money if we go On-Demand’ crap because there are many creative ways to make a profit going down that path. Though I’m not going to make your life easier by telling you how.