Beijing Action to be Broadcast Live in U.S.
May 29, 2008There will be something very different about the Beijing Olympics. For most viewers in the U.S. coverage will be available live, as it happens, for the Games’ signature sports, including gymnastics—a major shift from NBC’s “plausibly live,” tape-delayed Olympic coverage of the past.
“I think coming off the [2006 Winter Games in] Torino a lot of lessons were learned,” USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny told the media. “Because of the way media is now set up, if you’re not live, you’re not real.”
Gymnastics start times in China have been shifted to the morning to facilitate live coverage in North America. “Everyone that I’ve talked to, both domestically and internationally, is very supportive of that, because we want to be relevant,” Penny pronounced. “It will pay huge dividends for the exposure and the awareness that our sport will get and the reaction [viewers] will have here in the United States.”
NBC will also offer live, streaming and on-demand coverage—more than 2,000 hours from 20 different Olympic venues, often simultaneously—on its website, nbcolympics.com. “Over the past 20 years, we have continually expanded our coverage of the Olympics to new platforms as they have become available, and the Beijing Games will mark another milestone,” said NBC Olympics President Gary Zenkel.
According to an NBC press release, the Internet coverage, which will be offered free of charge to U.S. viewers, will also feature metadata overlays that “enable fans to have access not only to high quality video, but also to the wealth of related content including results, statistics, comprehensive bios, rules and expert analysis.”
You can also catch the Games on your cell phone with NBCOlympics2Go, which will provide live video to mobile users on certain networks. Available to all AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon customers: mobile alerts of results and breaking news along with daily photo and video highlights.
NBC still plans to feature traditional primetime programming of popular sports—most notably, gymnastics, swimming and beach volleyball—but the 12-hour time difference between Beijing and New York will allow the bulk of that coverage to be featured live, for the first time since NBC got the Games in 1992. While prelims will likely be tape delayed, all of the gymnastics medal events are set to take place during U.S. primetime. (What U.S. viewers will be watching in primetime will actually be taking place the next morning in Beijing.)
NBC announced last year they plan to offer a whopping 3,600 hours of Olympic coverage across their NBC Universal stations—1,000 hours more than the total coverage for every televised Summer Olympics in U.S. history to date, and three times the coverage offered of Athens. NBC is already offering an on-demand channel filled with pre-Olympic features via DirecTV and certain cable providers, along with a wealth of video content on its website. (Much of the Internet content will also be made available on demand.)
During the Games, high definition coverage—NBC started regularly covering gymnastics in HD at last year’s USAs—will be available on NBC, USA, MSNBC, CNBC and Universal HD; the first time NBC has broadcast a summer Olympics primarily in HD. (Limited HD coverage, using the Olympic world feed, was available on a one-day delay in 2004.)
Other NBC Universal-owned networks that will offer coverage of the Games include: Bravo, the Spanish-language Telemundo and Oxygen, which will feature a nightly two-hour gymnastics preview/recap show prior to NBC’s primetime coverage.
It all gets underway on 8/8/08 at 8 PM, Beijing time.
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