https://www.sportworldnews.org/world/media/big/image2342.jpg

I love the gymnastics ! I find it amazing , takes so much talent to be good at this !:) I also like track and beach volleyball !!;)

Eliminating some of the sports commonly seen in the US,, like basketball, soccer, baseball, softball, which I can see easily even without the Olympics, I like the shoot and score things, like water polo or field hockey or team handball (kind of a basketball/soccer/hockey hybrid).

It also helps when something is shown live at a time convenient to me. Right now the live swimming finals in prime time rock, even with no crowds.

In case anyone is wondering why Pavan hasn’t posted in a few weeks, he’s playing over in Tokyo on the number one ranked Canadian women’s beach volleyball team.

266255

Eliminating some of the sports commonly seen in the US,, like basketball, soccer, baseball, softball, which I can see easily even without the Olympics, I like the shoot and score things, like water polo or field hockey or team handball (kind of a basketball/soccer/hockey hybrid).

It also helps when something is shown live at a time convenient to me. Right now the live swimming finals in prime time rock, even with no crowds.


I like water polo too !! :)


https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/75689b86139d4a0cac43fa1db3e49d8f/800.jpeg

Men's & Women's: 100 meters, 200 meters, 400 meters, 800 meters 4 x 100 relay, 4 x 400 relay & 4 x 800 relay.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Usain_Bolt_winning-cropped.jpg/1200px-Usain_Bolt_winning-cropped.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NbT_wDayEe8/maxresdefault.jpg

I always enjoy the gymnastics. I can't believe how high they can flip themselves into the air.

I love me some ladies beach volleyball! :)

Eliminating some of the sports commonly seen in the US,, like basketball, soccer, baseball, softball, which I can see easily even without the Olympics, I like the shoot and score things, like water polo or field hockey or team handball (kind of a basketball/soccer/hockey hybrid).

I agree on the 3 sports you mentioned. I wish the sports channels would show that stuff more often, not just during the Olympics. Exceptions to those might be indoor volleyball, which I used to really like before the spikers became so powerful and efficient that it seemed impossible to dig their cannon shots, forcing changes in the scoring rules. I disliked beach volleyball for a long time since it seemed like just an excuse to televise skin, but I've relented a little since the game play now seems more faithful to classic volleyball than the current indoor version.

Things I like: Diving, distance running, speedwalking (for the inevitable heartbreaking disqualifications right before the finish line :) ), velodrome cycling.

Things I don't like: equestrian, rugby sevens (might be a different story if they played with full rosters), softball, rhythmic gymnastics, and some of the marginal sports that only seem to be added to increase the American medal count and US TV ratings (for example, dirt biking).

Gymnastics! :)

Random thoughts:

- Rugby seems kind of dumb (Sorry rugby fans)

- Archery is fun

- And if you’ve seen horse dancing, that one you can explain to me…

Exceptions to those might be indoor volleyball, which I used to really like before the spikers became so powerful and efficient that it seemed impossible to dig their cannon shots, forcing changes in the scoring rules.

Remember when teams could only score when they were serving? Now that was endlessly tedious.

Random thoughts:

- Rugby seems kind of dumb (Sorry rugby fans)

- Archery is fun

- And if you’ve seen horse dancing, that one you can explain to me…


We are watching women's rugby right now France vs. Fiji , I'm enjoying it, kinda a cross between football and soccer but without kicking the ball ! :)Hubby says it's OK , I like it more ;)

Just got finished watching mens diving on NBC ,swimming was coming up and I'm really bored with swimming, so glad we found the women's rugby on USA channel ! :cool:

Gymnastics! :)

Yes!!! :) Hoping Simone will be OK !! ;):heart:

Men's & Women's: 100 meters, 200 meters, 400 meters, 800 meters 4 x 100 relay, 4 x 400 relay & 4 x 800 relay.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Usain_Bolt_winning-cropped.jpg/1200px-Usain_Bolt_winning-cropped.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NbT_wDayEe8/maxresdefault.jpg

Yep !! :) Looking forward to seeing some track and field !! ;)

I always enjoy the gymnastics. I can't believe how high they can flip themselves into the air.


They are amazing !!:) I never get tired of gymnastics ! ! ;)

I love me some ladies beach volleyball! :)

Yeah, it's fun!! Much more interesting than regular court volleyball ! Love to see them jumping around in the sand, but I'm thinking you are looking at the girls in the bikinis and not the sand? ! :eek::D

Men's beach volleyball coming up on USA channel ! ;)

NBC, which made the Tokyo Olympics the "Simone Biles Games," seems oblivious to its role in her exit (https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/simone-biles-nbc-olympics-gymnastics-attention-pressure-responsibility.html)

During NBC's coverage of Simone Biles' withdrawal this week, the network has ignored "the role it may have played in creating the conditions for Biles’ sudden exit," says Justin Peters. "As per its cyclical mandate to give casual American sports fans one or two big-name U.S. Olympians for whom to root, NBC has effectively turned the Tokyo Games into the Simone Biles Games. In the run-up to the Olympics and during the first few days of competition, you could hardly visit any NBC-branded property without encountering some sort of coverage of Biles, her chances for matching or exceeding her memorable Rio performance, and her uncharacteristic stumbles in the Olympic trials and in the qualifying rounds. The American gymnastics squad is filled with immensely talented and likable athletes. As far as NBC is concerned, though, there’s Simone Biles, and then there’s all these other people who just happen to be on her team." Peters adds: "As the leading promoter of the Olympics in the U.S., it is a bit rich for NBC to report on the psychological pressures faced by Biles without also reflecting on the ways in which its choice to make Tokyo the Simone Games surely intensified those pressures. It’d be sort of like if your boss announced to an auditorium filled with your co-workers that the fate of the company was riding on your work output, and then took you aside to sympathetically observe that you looked stressed, and that the key to happiness was a healthy work-life balance. While I cannot blame NBC for featuring Biles as its star attraction, the network ought to be able to candidly assess and admit the ramifications of its own wall-to-wall coverage. Simone Biles made herself a champion. NBC tried to make her into a superhero. The fact that she chose to reject the cape should prompt a reevaluation of the process by which it was sewn for her in the first place. The job of creating quadrennial TV sports heroes isn’t an easy one. The discontinuous nature of the Olympics means that casual fans don’t have many opportunities to develop deep rooting interests in most of the sports therein. As such, most people really do rely on NBC and its affiliates to curate a roster of superstars to cheer for and complain about. This is the reason why NBC focuses so intensely and unflinchingly on five or six people each games. With only two-and-a-half weeks to work with, the network needs to go overboard drumming it into your head that these are the people to watch. For the people being watched, though, this sudden, inescapable pressure and attention can be an incredibly alienating experience. Unlike basketball, football, and baseball players in the United States, elite Olympic athletes like Biles do not exist under a continuous microscope. Outside of their sports’ superfans, most Americans watch them intensely for a couple of weeks every four years, and then basically don’t think about them unless they appear in a Subway commercial or their sport makes the news for its abusive practices. We put all this pressure on them to perform, and then feign confusion when they cite all that pressure as the reason why they didn’t perform."

ALSO:


Does watching the Olympics make you a bad person? (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/opinion/tokyo-olympics-tv-ethics.html): "The Olympic Games in Tokyo have been even more fraught than usual with ethical issues," says Sasha Mudd. "Alarm over the rising number of Covid-19 cases and the Games’ deep unpopularity with Japanese people sit atop perennial concerns about corruption, cheating, the abuse of athletes and the environmental impact of mounting such an enormous event. These problems have fueled debate, hand-wringing and even demands to end the Olympics altogether. Despite all that, the Games are underway, and for most of the world’s population, there is only one moral decision left to make: To watch or not to watch? If you are one of the many who view the actions of the International Olympic Committee, the television stations and sponsors, and the nations competing as morally wrong, is it ethical for you to tune in? Of course, viewers aren’t watching the Games to intentionally endorse a corrupt system or the idea of profit over public health. They’re watching to celebrate our common humanity, to be awed by athletic excellence and to witness the drama of Olympic dreams being dashed or realized. But by opting to watch the Olympics, do we give a tacit thumbs-up to the entire spectacle, ethical problems and all? At the heart of this worry is the idea that merely by choosing to be entertained by something that involves wrongdoing, we become complicit in it. But just how worried should we be? To answer this question, the idea of complicity needs unpacking."
Should NBC News be covering the Tokyo Games as if it's a major news story? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/nbc-olympics/2021/07/27/fac6bfa8-ee4a-11eb-a452-4da5fe48582d_story.html): "During their broadcasts on Monday, ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS’s Evening News devoted about two minutes each to recounting the latest triumphs and disappointments at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo," says Paul Farhi. "Over on NBC’s Nightly News, however, it was a different story — a much bigger one. Anchoring live from Tokyo, Lester Holt introduced a parade of news stories and features about the Games. There was the latest on superstar gymnast Simone Biles and two separate interviews with U.S. swimmers, complete with copious highlight footage. The broadcast even had time for a piece about a controversy over women’s uniforms. In all, the network devoted more than eight minutes of its broadcast, or roughly a third of its airtime, to the Olympics. NBC News’s representatives say its extensive coverage is driven by public interest and newsworthiness. A spokesperson said the Games are 'the world’s largest event in every way' and the first major gathering of the coronavirus era, thus justifying the program’s intense focus on all things Olympics-related. But NBC’s news judgment may have something to do with corporate priorities — and a whole lot of money, too. NBC News is owned by NBCUniversal, which has committed more than $12 billion for the exclusive TV and digital rights to 10 Summer and Winter Games from 2014 to 2032. The company’s sports division is showcasing thousands of hours of the competition in Tokyo on NBC and on a constellation of smaller company-owned networks, such as CNBC, USA and Peacock, its streaming service. NBCUniversal has sold more than $1.2 billion in advertising around its Olympics coverage this year, more than its haul at the Rio Olympics in 2016, and the network is counting on wide exposure to help sell subscriptions to Peacock. With so much on the line for NBCUniversal and its parent company, Comcast, its news division has gotten behind the effort, too."
Lester Holt on being in "soft quarantine" while anchoring NBC Nightly News from Tokyo (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2021-07-27/nbc-nightly-news-anchor-lester-holt-from-the-olympics-in-tokyo): "Well, it means that I’m not stuck indoors for 14 days," he says. "They require us to stay at the hotel for 14 days. But within that as journalists we can go to venues. So the other day I had to go to the Olympic stadium. Our whereabouts are pre-notified — that I’m going to this venue and I’m doing this — but nothing that has really inhibited our ability to cover the Games. The restrictions really come to play when it comes to getting out and about on the streets. "


NBC's Olympics coverage averaged about 14 million TV-only viewers Tuesday, down from the 33.44 million TV-only viewers who watched the same night of the 2016 Rio Games (https://twitter.com/AustinKarp/status/1420503181134532613)

Streaming viewership is expected to add to that low number, but not by much.

NBC's disappointing Tokyo Olympics ratings has already sparked "make good" talks with advertisers (https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/nbcuniversal-tokyo-olympics-make-goods-advertising-1235028563/)

NBC Universal has already begun conversation on "make goods,” or ad inventory that is given to sponsors when a program fails to meet its original viewership guarantees, because ratings have fallen far short of expectations so far. As Variety's Brian Steinberg reports, "while NBC’s Olympics are beating competitors’ programs each night, early ratings for NBCU’s TV broadcasts are 'clearly are not what NBC, our agency or our clients were looking for,' said one media buying executive. This buyer cited a lack of must-follow athlete storylines early in the competition; early-morning availability of coverage via streaming; and the absence of live fans at the Games due to the coronavirus pandemic as factors in a downturn of viewing. This executive said early viewership trends were 'disappointing.'"

Women's track was just on and now watching men's hurdles on the USA channel !;) Showed a little of men's disc throwing too!! Fun !!! :)

WHOA !! Australia and USA women's rugby right now on NBC . WOW Australia was winning till now , USA caught up and is in the lead , very awesome being it's not really an American sport !! :eek:I find it very interesting, kinda violent !! Haven't seen men's rugby yet, can't wait too ! I'm liking this sport!!! ;)

WHOA !! Australia and USA women's rugby right now on NBC . WOW Australia was winning till now , USA caught up and is in the lead , very awesome being it's not really an American sport !! :eek:I find it very interesting, kinda violent !! Haven't seen men's rugby yet, can't wait too ! I'm liking this sport!!! ;)

I saw the US men blow a 21-0 lead. Apparently that’s bad.

Oooo, live trampoline action on CNBC

When placed in the proper context, NBC's Olympics coverage and dismal ratings aren't that terrible (https://www.vulture.com/2021/07/nbc-peacock-olympics-nightmare-scenario.html)

The complaints about NBC's Olympics coverage and Peacock being a confusing mess (https://www.primetimer.com/item/Why-is-Peacocks-Olympics-coverage-such-a-confusing-mess-olSGod) are warranted, says Josef Adalian. But Olympics viewers have never had it so good in terms of live options for watching the Summer Olympics. And while the ratings are indeed abysmal compared to five years ago, so are a lot of big events, including the Oscars. "Some of the complaining about figuring out 'how' to watch the Olympics on the NBC platforms is a classic case of 'be careful what you wish for,'" says Adalian. "After all, for years the rap on NBC’s coverage was that the network offered almost nothing but prepackaged, and often pretaped, extended highlights shows. Audiences would have to wait until prime time to see events which finished up hours earlier; sports fans who wanted deep coverage of less high-profile events were often out of luck. The fact that NBC now pretty much lets anyone with a cable login watch every event live, in real time, is a massive improvement over the status quo of a decade or two ago. And it’s certainly a lot better than it was back in the 20th century, when NBC — and previous Olympics hosts CBS and ABC — treated the Olympics as a prime-time soap opera, serving up only the story lines it felt would appeal to a broad audience (thank you, Roone Arledge). NBC still does this with its main coverage, of course, but audiences now have more choice than ever before." Adalian also questions whether we should consider the disappointing ratings so far a surprise. "Acknowledging that these numbers are awful doesn’t mean you also need to buy into the notion that they represent some shocking disaster or repudiation of NBCU’s coverage," says Adalian. "Fact is, anyone who pays attention to the linear TV ecosystem cannot at all be surprised at the ratings for Tokyo. Almost everything on traditional TV is pulling in numbers sharply lower than five years ago, with many programs and networks off by 30, 40, even 50 percent. And the pandemic has only accelerated the shift from linear to streaming, as locked-down or crowd-wary audiences have gotten more used to summoning programs on demand versus watching as scheduled. Consider what’s happened to Thursday night network TV, for decades home to some of the medium’s most popular shows. On one night back in May 2016, new episodes of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory and ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy notched a 3.4 and 2.1 rating, respectively, in Nielsen’s all-important adults under 50 rating. Fast-forward five years to the same night in 2021, and the Nielsen wreckage is impossible to ignore: Big Bang replacement (and spinoff) Young Sheldon managed a mere 0.6 demo rating, while 16-year-old Grey’s was down to a 0.9. So yes, the ratings declines for Tokyo are terrible. If things don’t turn around, ratings-wise, in the second half of the Games, I don’t think it would be melodramatic to describe these declines as NBCU’s nightmare scenario. But when the Oscars barely crack 10 million viewers and ratings for nearly every sport other than football continue to decline, well … it’s hard to be shocked anymore by Nielsen’s verdict. We simply live in a completely different TV universe than the one that existed during the last Summer Olympics. A fair assessment of the numbers also has to take into account the slew of external factors completely out of NBCU’s control that have made it difficult to come out of the gate with any ratings momentum, including the lack of spectators because of COVID; the 13-hour time difference between Tokyo and New York; and the early disappointing performances of the U.S. men’s basketball and women’s soccer teams. What’s more, as bad as these early numbers have been compared to Rio and London, NBC’s prime-time TV coverage is still walloping everything else on linear right now. Its coverage is pulling in anywhere from two to four times more than the other major broadcasters combined." ALSO: The problem with the Tokyo Olympics is that they are everywhere, but they are harder than ever to find (https://nypost.com/2021/07/29/nbc-failing-to-earn-gold-at-olympics-as-it-faces-tricky-dilemma/).

The NBC Sports YouTube channel is the best place to watch the Tokyo Olympics (https://www.vulture.com/article/youtube-best-place-watch-olympics.html)

"Getting into the Olympics doesn’t require staying up until three in the morning or avoiding spoilers until it airs in your time," says Zoe Haylock. "While many events aren’t live on television, the NBC Sports YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/NBCSports/videos) updates throughout the day, showcasing the best moments, top athletes, and strongest countries just hours after they perform in Tokyo. (For major athletes, they go up even sooner.) Most videos are super-cuts of the event or team, giving you a clean overview of a tense category and a front-row seat to domination. In single-athlete sports like gymnastics, videos are edited together so you watch all of their attempts at once, instead of having to find several tiny clips or scan through the entire competition. That way, you have all the context for a big win or a dramatic loss."

Love to see them jumping around in the sand, but I'm thinking you are looking at the girls in the bikinis and not the sand? ! :eek::D

I always like to look at ladies in bikinis, so yes, it's that. :)

I’m hoping to see some rock climbing (it’s new). I’m kind of curious to see what that’s all about.

Comparing Canadian TV's Olympics coverage on CBC to NBC: "CBC does share NBC’s penchant for rah-rah style post-race interviews" (https://theathletic.com/2746210/2021/08/02/2021-olympics-tv-broadcast-nbc-cbc/)

Unlike NBC, CBC begins its primetime coverage at 6 p.m. ET, says The Athletic's Richard Deitsch, an American living in Toronto. "That is not a misprint. There was no break for local or national news and the network morphed directly from its Tokyo Today program, which featured replays and updates, to its prime-time coverage." Referring to former NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol, Deitsch adds: "It doesn’t take long watching CBC coverage to realize that the network does not craft its coverage as an Ebersolian-packaged prime-time drama. Sure, there’s a touch of narrative storytelling on the prime-time show, but the competition is always the star. CBC does share NBC’s penchant for rah-rah style post-race interviews, but I will say the best television moment of the Tokyo Games so far — at least from these eyes and ears — came from CBC on Saturday night when Canada swimmer Sydney Pickrem was asked about the pressure of swimming the third leg in the women’s 4×100-meter medley relay." ALSO: Watch Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg hilariously recap an Olympic Equestrian event for Peacock (https://people.com/sports/tokyo-olympics-kevin-hart-snoop-dogg-hilariously-recap-equestrian-event/).

I’m hoping to see some rock climbing (it’s new). I’m kind of curious to see what that’s all about.

It finally got underway. Anyone ever play the Tomb Raider or Uncharted video game series? It reminded me of that. (Without the hideous death for one bad move, of course).

NBC's Olympics coverage was always going to be a failure when corporate profits are the top priority (https://time.com/6086641/tokyo-olympics-nbc-peacock/)

On the first Sunday night of NBC's Tokyo Olympics coverage, the network opted to squish Alexis Sablone, the only American skater who qualified in the first-ever women’s street skateboarding Olympic final, to a muted tiny split-screen box while a loud Geico ad blasted on the larger box. "To be fair, Sablone was so far behind Nishiya and the other medalists that even a flawless performance wouldn’t have done much to get her on the podium," says Judy Berman. "Still, the disrespect toward an American Olympian rankled me (and no small number of other viewers), especially at the end of what had already been an extremely confusing first weekend of coverage from NBC. From Twitter and Reddit to Slack chats and real-life living rooms, everyone seemed to be expressing frustration with what we were seeing—or not seeing—out of Tokyo. Those gripes have, if anything, ramped up over the past week. Now, complaining about TV coverage of the Olympics is such a time-honored tradition that it might as well be a medal sport unto itself. But this year’s grumbling has been some of the loudest in recent memory. It’s easy to blame NBC—whose abysmal early ratings had plunged even lower by the end of last week—for this disaster. Is that fair, though? Could these pandemic games ever have been anything but anticlimactic?" While the pandemic has been a big factor in NBC's disastrous Olympics coverage, Berman says NBC's focus on corporate profits were always going to make its coverage unpopular. "In other words, some of viewers’ greatest frustrations surrounding the Tokyo Olympics are rooted in the challenges of making a $7.75 billion Olympics coverage deal that NBC signed in 2014—about a century ago in streaming-wars time—as lucrative as possible for NBC Universal, cable companies and advertisers," says Berman. "Certainly, that goes a long way towards explaining why a Geico ad took precedence over an American skateboarder’s last act in Tokyo. NBC deserves any blowback it gets for disrespecting Sablone and for many other baffling individual choices. (See also: well-founded exasperation from Greg Braxton at the L.A. Times over seeing Naomi Osaka shunted to cable while NBC aired rugby (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-07-27/tokyo-olympics-2021-nbc-peacock-biles-osaka-roundtable). ('The most famous female athlete in the world was being treated almost as a sideshow on a small stage,' Braxton writes, 'when she should have been in the center ring.') Ultimately, though, the impediment to better Olympics coverage is a larger system that entrusts NBCU and other bottom-line-driven media megacorps to deliver the world’s most important news, cultural and, yes, sports events to a public that deserves to know about them. Never is the need for a powerful, well-funded public broadcaster on the level of the BBC in the U.S. more apparent than it is during the Olympics. This might sound like a utopian solution, and maybe it is at this late, confusing stage in the life of American TV. But the Olympics are, in theory if not in practice, a utopian tradition. Pandemic or no pandemic, time difference or no time difference, streaming wars or streaming detente—coverage of the games that prioritizes corporate profits over service to viewers is always going to fall short."

ALSO:


NBC should learn to trust its audience, especially with coverage of Simone Biles' bronze medal-winning performance (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-08-03/tokyo-olympics-simone-biles-balance-beam-nbc): "If the producers of the NBC broadcast want my advice — and I am sure they do not — I would have told them to air a tightly edited highlight reel of the women’s balance beam final at the top of the broadcast and let the night’s focus fall instead on what live events there are," says Matt Brennan. "Trust the hardcore gymnastics fans to watch live. Trust the prime-time audience to know what happened by now. Trust genuine Olympic surprises and upsets to create tension, not canned teases from Tirico, hosting from home base. If I weren’t waiting for Biles to turn up, I just might let myself be swept away."
Taylor Swift narrated an NBC video in tribute to Simone Biles after her bronze medal win (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-simone-biles-tribute-video-tokyo-olympics-1207099/): “What do we want from our heroes? What do we expect from them? What do we need from them?,” Swift says in the video (https://twitter.com/NBCOlympics/status/1422678915915583489). “What happens when they surprise us? When you have the attention of the world, everything you do takes on a bigger meaning. It can be a heavy burden. It can be a chance to change everything.”
COVID completely changed Olympic sound design (https://www.fastcompany.com/90659776/3600-microphones-and-counting-the-ingenious-ways-the-sound-of-the-olympics-is-created): "The lack of spectators means that the roar of the crowd is entirely absent," says Joshua Reiss. "This alters the acoustics of the space. Sound echoes around a stadium very differently when there are no bodies and clothing to absorb it. And with relative silence compared to the constant high volume of tens of thousands of people, we end up hearing cicadas buzzing, lights humming, and camera shutters clicking. This is addressed partly by fake crowd noise. Customized recordings of cheering at similar events at previous Olympics are being played out of the speakers around the stadium. Many sports broadcasters have also been overlaying what they call an audio carpet, which is ambient sound of a full stadium when there is no action taking place. But canned crowd noise comes with challenges of its own as it clashes completely with the visuals of empty seats. From a sound design perspective, however, having empty stadiums is not all bad. Sometimes, it’s just different. Microphones are still placed very close to a sound source to capture just that sound. And with even less background noise, these spot mics are able to better capture impact sounds—the crack, slap, and thump associated with rackets, wheels, bodies, and earth colliding. We can hear more clearly the coaching on the sidelines and the shouting between players on a team...New methods for capturing, rendering, and even enhancing the sounds of Tokyo 2020 had specialists excited well before COVID-19 hit. More than ever before, these Olympics are being delivered in what is known as immersive audio. Microphones—3,600 of them—have been deployed all over, hung from closed-venue ceilings, embedded in rock-climbing walls, and placed on water polo goalposts. The variety of sounds they capture are mixed and broadcast in such a way that viewers hear what the athletes might hear and more."
Last week, NBC had network TV's largest weekly audience since CBS aired the Super Bowl (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-08-03/tv-ratings-story-for-the-week-of-july-26-aug-1-wed-aug-4-2021): NBC had some positive news despite the Tokyo Games' first week falling 52.4% from the first week of the Rio Games.


Simone Biles' bronze medal win boosts NBC's ratings (https://www.thewrap.com/simone-biles-tokyo-olympics-ratings-bronze-medal-win-beam-viewers/)

About 17.4 million watched NBC's Olympic coverage Tuesday night, marking the first time since the 1988 Seoul Games that the second Olympics Tuesday outdrew the first.

What’s the point of the water in the steeplechase? Just to be annoying?

NBC's Summer Olympics coverage has been a worldwide effort, from Tokyo to London to Connecticut (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/nbc-tokyo-olympics-friends-and-family-video-1234991819)

The pandemic upended how NBC produces televises the Olympics (https://forums.primetimer.com/forum/4867-2021-olympic-games/). Instead of deploying a full crew in Tokyo, NBC Sports shifted its production across facilities around the world. “This is the first year where our footprint here has eclipsed our footprint in-country,” says NBC Sports vice president of engineering Tim Canary, who's been working out of NBC's facility in Stamford, Connecticut. The International Broadcast Center in Tokyo and NBC Sports’ Stamford headquarters were the main hubs, but NBC has also used NBC headquarters in New York City's Rockefeller Plaza, CNBC’s headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and Telemundo’s facility in Miami, as well as Comcast-owned Sky in London. In fact, all of NBC's indoor volleyball coverage originates in London. The lack of friends and family in Tokyo has also led NBC Sports to deploy a “Friends and Family” strategy of trying to bring the celebrations that are happening in homes and hometowns around the country to viewers at home, such as the viral video of Olympic swimmer Lydia Jacoby's friends and family's reaction in Alaska to her surprise gold win. “We’ve been working on this for months, even before the news was announced that international fans would not be allowed to travel to Tokyo,” said NBC Olympics primetime producer Rob Hyland. “It’s a pretty elaborate plan… It has its own production wing, and the umbrella continues to get bigger and bigger.” Meanwhile, NBC Sports set up a production facility in the ballroom of the downtown Marriott Hotel in Stamford to keep "shot pickers" -- the employees who find Olympic highlights -- socially distant from each other. “We have replay people at home, we have graphics people here for Sunday Night Football. That was not possible in the past,” says Canary. “A lot of things that we could do, that maybe shows were resistant to do, we had to do during COVID, because we couldn’t put people in trucks, we couldn’t put them in the field.”

ALSO:


NBC's Olympics coverage has been a user experience nightmare (https://www.fastcompany.com/90661989/watching-the-olympics-has-been-a-ux-nightmare): "In the United States, watching the Games this year has been a logistical nightmare," says Mark Wilson. "The difficultly in figuring out which events are happening when, and how to watch them, undermines the 7,000 hours of otherwise carefully planned competition. America’s roughly 13-hour time difference with Tokyo doesn’t help. But the problems are exacerbated by a complicated circle of broadcast rights, coupled with a strange combination of real-time coverage, prime-time replays, and sports streamed across a handful of different services. We live in an age when one can find any childhood TV show to stream in seconds. You can have any food fetish delivered to your door in an hour. But if you want to see the 100-meter women’s hurdles finals before the results are in your news feed? Good luck. The capabilities that technology affords broadcasters were supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, they’ve made them harder—at least during this year’s Games...One problem is that in the U.S., broadcast rights belong to NBCUniversal exclusively. NBC is a TV channel, yes, but it’s also a series of cable networks, the NBC Sports App, NBC’s Tokyo 2020 Olympics App for TV, and the Peacock streaming app. During the Olympics, it’s also a streaming website. NBCUniversal, like all other big media companies, knows that streaming is the future (streaming currently accounts for a third of all TV time, but Nielsen says that figure is growing quickly), and so it needs to build out platforms like Peacock to survive in that future. To get consumers using more of these services, NBC has sliced and diced Olympics coverage across all of its platforms. For instance, you can watch the full women’s gymnastics events only on Peacock. And if you plan to watch any sport in 4K? Just cross your fingers. Streaming full-length Olympic replays sounds like it’s a perfect solution to having so many sports across so many platforms, but these streams are tightly controlled by ad dollars. Some are presented in six-hour-long chunks, preventing you from fast-forwarding (lest you skip a commercial), meaning that if you wanted to see something at hour five of the stream, you need to stream five literal hours to get there. Is this just the way of the modern world? No. The rest of the globe doesn’t live this way because NBCUniversal doesn’t control the Olympics broadcast worldwide."
Amber Ruffin's goal covering her first Olympics is to exude positivity (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/nbc-tokyo-olympics-friends-and-family-video-1234991819/): “The interviewers ask stressful questions like, ‘Do you know that everyone’s counting on you?’” says Ruffin in a gruff voice in one video, wagging her finger at the camera. Ruffin, in contrast, has a slightly lighter note. “Question No. 1: Do you know you did an amazing job?” she asked athletes such as Sarah Sponcil and Kelly Cales, two U.S. beach volleyball players, as they left competition venues.
How Nastia Liukin helped viewers, and NBC, navigate Simone Biles’ absence (https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2021/08/04/nastia-liukin-nbc-simone-biles-twisties/)


NBC's Olympics coverage cared so much about Simone Biles, it failed to promote American track stars Sydney McLaughlin, Athing Mu and Dalilah Muhammad (https://slate.com/culture/2021/08/nbc-olympics-track-sydney-mclaughlin-athing-mu-coverage.html)

"Why hasn’t NBC made more of these extraordinary athletes—not just on the day of their events, but over the course of the entire Tokyo Games?" asks Justin Peters. "By all rights, McLaughlin, Muhammad, and 800-meter gold medalist Athing Mu, who also won gold for the U.S. in her event on Tuesday night—the first time an American woman had done so since 1968—would have made for excellent breakout stars of the Tokyo Games. All three are telegenic, diverse, and extremely talented within their events, which exist as part of a sport that is one of the marquee sports at every Summer Games. And yet, as far as NBC has been concerned, the three American track stars and many of their cohort have been but momentary diversions from the real story of the Games: Whatever Simone Biles is or is not doing at any given moment. Biles is a transcendent star and her emotional journey has been the story of the Tokyo Olympics. But the American track stars who excelled on Tuesday also had credible claims for their stories to also be the stories of the Games. Instead, they have labored in relative obscurity as NBC has focused much of its coverage on swimming, gymnastics, and swimming and gymnastics. The disparity between the quality of the track athletes’ performances in Tokyo and the quality of the television coverage that they’ve received this year has been frustrating and confusing. If the Olympics are, as I’ve suggested before, primarily a television show, then why does NBC have such consistent trouble turning American track stars into main characters?"

NBC's Olympics coverage looks like a turning point for streaming of mainstream sports (https://slate.com/culture/2021/08/streaming-sports-exclusives-peacock-olympics-nfl-prime-future.html)

Paying for mainstream sporting events on streaming is likely to become the norm in wake of NBC putting live coverage of the Tokyo Games on Peacock, says Alex Kirshner. "The constant push to get you to buy Peacock—whether through advertising or the coercion of putting major events on the platform—is an annoyance," says Kirshner. "There’s a great chance you already pay for NBC and its many sports offerings on linear TV or a digital equivalent like Hulu + Live or YouTubeTV, to say nothing of CNBC, MSNBC, USA Network, Bravo, and assorted other products under NBC’s umbrella. The effort to blunt-force you into paying for the streaming service is an overt attempt by Comcast to double-dip into your wallet, or even to triple-dip if the telecom company is also your internet or cable provider. Then you’re paying for Wi-Fi, NBC’s TV channels, and Peacock. If you are a sports fan, keeping up the resistance much longer will prove quite the endurance test. Fans who care enough about particular teams in particular sports have already been paying for streaming services for years to watch the games they’re passionate about. But the 2020 Olympics feel like an inflection point, the first moment when high-profile competitions in arguably the world’s most mainstream sporting event are stashed behind a streaming paywall instead of beamed out over network, cable, or satellite TV (or, again, a digital version of the same). Starting more or less right now, it will be increasingly hard to be a serious fan of a popular American sport and not buy a streaming service to keep watching it. The alternative will be missing a lot of games, which plenty of sports fans will decide is not a palatable choice. It bears repeating that this won’t be a new requirement for a lot of American fans. If you like the English Premier League, NBC already presented you with the choice of getting Peacock or missing about half the games that would otherwise be available to you. If you like an out-of-your-market team in MLB, the NFL, NHL, or NBA, you may have been buying a streaming service for years, or at least a similar cable package add-on.* Otherwise, you’ve only watched occasional national TV games. If you want to watch much of the WNBA or NWSL, you’ve had to buy a streaming service, regardless of whether that service is any good. If your alma mater’s football team is in a nonpower conference, it has almost certainly had games behind a digital paywall at ESPN+ ($6.99 a month). Making an exhaustive list of all the sporting events exclusively on streaming platforms would take a year. The Olympics are a different animal, though. The Tokyo Games are the most popular sporting event yet to require American viewers to pony up for streaming in order to take in marquee contests. Traditional TV ratings for these Games are way down, but NBC was probably prepared for that kind of freefall given that it’s been happening all pandemic. The company decided to lean into streaming and had no problem finding advertisers, whom NBC says spent more than $1.2 billion (at least) to air ads during the Games. If the most blue-chip of all sporting events and advertising opportunities can get partially paywalled on a streaming site, then so can anything else."

ALSO:


2024 Paris Summer Olympics is likely to ditch the traditional Opening Ceremony for a river presentation (https://sports.yahoo.com/the-games-to-change-the-games-paris-2024-lays-out-innovative-olympic-plan-063950354.html): "Rather than hold an elaborate, made-for-TV show inside the Stade de France, the French want to take the show on the road … or river," reports Yahoo! Sports' Dan Wetzel. "The plan is to have the athlete delegations ride boats down the River Seine, which runs through the center of the city, including past landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre and so much more. It’s estimated 300,000 or more fans could line the river to greet and cheer them...After all, if you have Paris as a backdrop then you should use Paris as your backdrop." Tony Estanguet, the president of Paris 2024, adds: "Delegations arrive in Paris by boat and cross this iconic city. Hundreds of thousands of fans welcoming them. That would be amazing.”
NBC's mistake was to think about the Olympics as a TV show (https://www.indiewire.com/2021/08/tokyo-olympics-nbc-peacock-problems-watch-1234655708/): "The biggest problem, whether it stems from perceived necessity or sheer indifference, is that NBC treats the Olympics like a giant television show," says Steve Greene. "Faced with unprecedented circumstances, the Tokyo Olympics has been more about creating the illusion of sports rather than presenting the sports themselves. It’s an approach that foregrounds the famous athletes and events, supplemented by faces who obtain fame for winning heats after they fall down or for not being able to contend with treacherous weather conditions. Even though this year’s Games are far from traditional — the ongoing global health crisis casts a long shadow — the network hype machine isn’t digging deep for unconventional stories. Instead, it’s reverted to the usual standbys: gymnastics, swimming, and track and field — probably because it’s far easier to craft an underdog story about someone who can run or swim the fastest than a rugby player or BMX champ whose skill is a lot harder to condense into a quickly digestible narrative."
How NBC can fix its Olympic coverage (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-08-06/tokyo-olympics-2021-nbc-peacock-how-to-fix): "It’s fair to argue that it’s not apt to use this year’s Games as a standard for what’s good and what’s bad about Olympics coverage when many things went wrong or were out of control — the COVID-19 pandemic, athletic disappointments and shortfalls, horrible weather, the absence of energy from live fans, and more," says Greg Braxton. "But there is much room for improvement. This year’s coverage was used as a tool to promote a relatively new streaming service, Peacock. NBC showcased skateboarding and golf while sidelining the live coverage of the match where Naomi Osaka, arguably the greatest female athlete alive, was ousted from her home Games. By spreading itself over so many channels, viewers were constantly confused as they battled a maze to find out when and where to watch. The other main area for improvement? Olympic coverage cannot act like the Games are taking place in a bubble. A cloud of racism came alongside the dramas of (Simone) Biles and Osaka, but that fact was scarcely dealt with during the broadcasts. There were numerous opportunities to develop stories about the topics raised by the numerous controversies coming into the event, from marijuana use to rules governing apparel. . And at a moment when anti-Asian bias has reached a troubling pitch in the country, much could have been made of how the triumphs of gymnast Suni Lee might bring much-needed joy to counter the hatred. The Olympics are an international event with real-world connections and ramifications, and NBC should make more of an effort to underscore that truth."
Bob Costas says it's unfair to be harsh on NBC's coverage because of the pandemic (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/business/media/nbc-olympics-tv-ratings.html): “You can only play the hand you’ve been dealt, and they’ve been dealt a difficult hand,” says the longtime former NBC Olympics host. “You can’t create something out of thin air. Everybody knows that this is, we hope, a one-of-a-kind Olympics. It’s like if somebody is running the 100 meters and they have a weight around their ankles. That is not a fair judge of their speed.”
Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg have been the best part of NBC's Olympics coverage (https://deadspin.com/kevin-hart-and-snoop-dogg-have-been-the-best-part-of-th-1847436973): "The Olympics have been lackluster. Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg have not," says Carron J. Phillips. "The decision to create a show around the pair hilariously commenting on highlights from different events has been a genius idea that should become the norm. It’s hard to have an 'Olympic moment' when you’re competing during a global pandemic. But, that doesn’t mean that we can’t laugh. And lucky for us, somebody over at NBC figured out that Hart and Snoop were perfect for the job."
The most offensive thing about Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg is NBC's lack of promotion (https://www.indiewire.com/video/kevin-hart-snoop-dogg-olympics-highlights-peacock-nbc-best-show-1234656207/): "NBC and Peacock have something really special in Olympic Highlights with Kevin Hart and Snoop Dogg. It’s just too bad they don’t realize it," says Libby Hill. Hill adds: "While Hart is a solid comedic presence, it’s Snoop that’s the real star of his show. He’s no stranger to hosting, what with his VH1 variety show with Martha Stewart, Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party, and Snoop acquits himself well to the anchor chair, quick with a quip and more than ready to exhibit real enthusiasm over the featured clips from the Olympics. The man is smooth as hell. Also key: It’s not just SportsCenter style banter that the pair are bringing to the table. On the episode from August 4, they spoke with women’s shot put silver medalist Raven Saunders, who sparked controversy by lifting her arms above her head in an X during the medal ceremony, which according to Saunders represented 'the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet.' Saunders has been outspoken about her battles with mental illness, as well as struggling to find her place in the world as an openly queer Black woman competing on the world stage. Snoop’s admiration of both Saunders’ accomplishments and her earnestness was clear, and it was really special to see honest engagement about issues of intersectionality be discussed on such a prominent platform."
Responding to technical difficulties, Mike Tirico seamlessly stepped in to briefly call the men's basketball gold medal game remotely from the studio (https://twitter.com/keithboykin/status/1423840735778979841)
Tokyo Games Closing Ceremony will air live on Peacock Sunday morning starting at 7 a.m. ET and on NBC Sunday in primetime (https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2021/08/05/2021-olympics-closing-ceremony-time-tv-channel-details/5504518001/)


Will NBC be able to win back viewers for future Olympics? (https://variety.com/2021/tv/columns/tokyo-olympics-nbc-column-1235035958/)

"What better Games to tune out than this one?" says Daniel D'Addario. "Through no fault of NBC or of host nation Japan, it rapidly came to seem the bad-vibes Olympiad. The empty seats in the sports venues seemed a perpetual drain on energy and vitality, and a reminder of the global cataclysm we all had not quite made it through. Ratings for live events from the NBA to the Oscars had collapsed during COVID season, and I’d wager it owes a great deal to the sense of missing production as much as it does to people being more distracted than ever before. What’s an opening ceremony with athletes waving into darkness? What’s a post-win celebration when the victorious swimmer’s splashes echo against hollow vastness? Where was the applause? It sounds silly: People should be able to enjoy live events without having an audience surrogate present. And yet the Olympics play on our most primal emotions: Not merely are they deeply rooted in tradition for older viewers, but they are explicitly modeled on ancient displays of valor meant to elevate members of the community. They’re where the world is supposed to come together, and doing that in abridged form feels alienating and uncanny. I’m not saying the Olympics should have had fans present, or that they shouldn’t have gone on without an audience. But it seems apparent that there was a deflated energy due to particular circumstances that may have accounted for lost viewership, and that spells bad things for cycles in the future. The Olympics — like, for instance, the Academy Awards, which also held a radically altered ceremony this year — need to seem important, meaningful and fun to younger audiences in order to create a new generation of viewership. This broadcast was held back from achieving that in a couple of ways."

ALSO:


Closing ceremony was bittersweet, ending the way it opened (https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2021/08/08/olympics-closing-ceremonies-live-updates/): "In the end — after all the upheavals, uncertainties, oddities and, of course, glorious moments of competition — the Games got its send-off from Tokyo on Sunday the way it opened: with the only sounds in a near-empty stadium the blaring music and the applause and cheers of athletes and volunteers," says Michelle Ye Hee Lee. "The Closing Ceremonies began with a video looking back at the two weeks of the Games. It acknowledged that there was “more tension than usual' due to the impact of the coronavirus and featured scenes that reflect “how we were able to bring these unprecedented Games to a peaceful close,' according to officials. 'The main focus of the video is not records and scores but the valiant efforts of all the athletes.'"
Winners (Old-Fashioned Cable Surfing) and Losers (Peacock) of NBC's coverage of the 2020 Tokyo Games (https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/tokyo-olympics/olympics-2021-nbc-peacock-paralympics/#loser-peacock): "Incredibly, Peacock’s utter failure to deliver elite streaming Olympics access this time around did clear the way for one (perhaps surprising) winner: Good old-fashioned cable!" says Alexis Gunderson, adding: "Two of the greatest joys of the Olympics, after all, are getting to fall wildly in love with the most random of sports (canoe slalom! handball! trampoline!), and getting to develop sudden and wholesome obsessions with the most unexpected of athletes (Raven Saunders! Tom Daley! Bryce Wettstein!) The thing is, you can’t really do either without a solid dose of serendipity, and as Allison alludes to in her piece on the limitations of streaming, it’s hard to manufacture the same sense of random chance that just… happens when surfing cable television. With NBC Universal running Olympics coverage across NBC, USA, NBC Sports, Telemundo, The Golf Channel and (I’m not kidding) CNBC, though, the very best kind of Olympics serendipity was in full supply for the last couple of weeks. Like, would I have used Peacock to seek out the middle third of the men’s archery qualifiers, or the last heats of the women’s C-1 200m canoe sprint semis, or the back half of the mixed triathlon finals all on my own? No! I absolutely would not have! Did I end up loving every second I watched, after stumbling onto all three? Yes! I absolutely did!"
Paris hopes to make the Olympics great again in 2024 with cheaper and greener games (https://www.politico.eu/article/paris-2024-olympics-plan-skeptics/)
Johnny Weir responds to criticism over his attention-grabbing hairstyle as co-host of the Closing Ceremony (http://johnny%20weir%20reacts%20to%20criticism%20over%20his%20attention-grabbing%20hairstyle%20as%20co-host%20of%20the%20closing%20ceremony/)


NBC's Tokyo Olympics primetime coverage averaged 15.5 million per night, a 42% decline from the Rio Games (https://www.wsj.com/articles/nbc-draws-its-lowest-summer-olympics-ratings-ever-for-tokyo-games-11628547501)

The 15.5 million average over the past 17 nights marked the lowest audience for the Summer Games since NBC started broadcasting them in 1988.

The Beijing Winter Olympics are less than six months away: Can NBC learn from its mistakes covering the Tokyo Summer Games? (https://theweek.com/culture/sports/1003414/what-nbc-can-do-differently-before-the-next-olympics-in6-months)

"It's a great American tradition to bash NBC's coverage of the Olympics, but there is absolutely no excuse for how confusing it's been to try to watch the Summer Games this year," says Jeva Lange. "With NBC, USA, CNBC, NBCSN, the Olympic Channel, the Golf Channel, Telemundo, and Peacock all carrying coverage, it's required dense viewing guides to figure out how to watch what, and where." She adds: "NBC desperately needs to get this straightened out, because it's shedding badly-needed viewers over the inconvenience...Having to jump between NBC's various channels or streams when an event is about to come on is confusing and stressful. Trying to revisit events afterward, though, can require clicking through literally hours of static cameras and dead air. Prioritizing a simplified, user-friendly experience with easy-to-navigate schedules in Beijing will be the bare minimum; editing the replay streams to include just the competitions and commentary would be the icing on the cake." NBC also has to be better at covering the politics of the Beijing Games. "As much as the IOC and broadcasters might want to ignore it, the Games are political. Pretending they aren't feels disconnected from reality, or worse, callous," says Lange, adding: "Politics will be an even more glaring issue during the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022. Already there is debate about boycotting the Games due to China's human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region, as well as anti-democratic crackdowns in Tibet and Hong Kong. Ignoring that those stories are also a part of the Games would be negligent to the point of complicity."

Peacock didn't give viewers much of a reason to stick around after the Olympics: Can it still thrive? (https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/9/22617399/peacock-olympics-streaming-whats-next)

"Peacock’s content skews more heavily toward old guard network programming rather than the innovative films and series being produced by the likes of Netflix, Disney, and Apple," says Catie Keck. "There might be enough of an appetite for that content to keep the service afloat. But in a world where cultural moments like Ted Lasso and WandaVision win viewers, Peacock will need to figure out its strategy — and fast."

NBC edited out 41% of the Closing Ceremony of the Tokyo Summer Olympics (https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1427845514670792705)

According to Tim Burke, NBC showed 1 hour and 20 minutes of the 2-hour, 20-minute Closing Ceremony for the primetime broadcast. Burke also revealed what NBC omitted, including the opening montage and the entrance of the Japan flag.