Not that I should be surprised, but trying to watch it today and it’s just talk talk talk talk. Commercials. More talk. Overhead shots of the stadium. People walking around in the rain. Talking head. Cut away to footage of Carl Lewis bitching about something. Instant replay of something they already showed. People hugging. Stadium shot. Human interest story. Commercial. Shot of Eiffel Tower. Promo for actual sports being shown on Peacock. Etc etc.
Meanwhile you can see there’s sporting events going on because they are showing them on the Jumbotron in the stadium shots. Really no excuse for this since most of this coverage is pre-recorded anyway.
Watching on peacock sucks so much too. Want to watch a replay? 2 minute commercials. It loads and you want to watch a specific part? 2 min commercial every time you fast forward. Want to use their chapters to go to certain events? It will load the event 5 min before showing a long shot of the stadium or something. Fast forward? MORE COMMERCIALS!
Nothing But Commercials
What’s sad is that’s a major improvement over what they were doing a few years ago and what they’re still doing on their main NBC Channel.
Well that validates me getting the ad free version for the month.
I’m 100% not surprised that their streaming system is laden with ads.
There is an ad free version? Ahhhhh!
I used instacart+ free trial to get a free trial of peacock. Based on my trial I would never pay for this… but if it’s better when actually paid for… I still wouldn’t.
Yeah… My wife wanted to watch Olympics and it was going to be a pita to find the specific stuff she wanted. So $17 was spent. :/ lol
Cheaper than a trip to Paris!
The archery footage blows. Face, target. Face, target. You can’t get a good feel for how far away the target is, nor the size of it. It’s much more impressive when you can get a view of the whole thing from an over the shoulder perspective.
Got to say I disagree on this. I think the focusing on the face/ bow and the target is actually the best way to show it. Over the shoulder shots are just hard to see anything. If you want an example of this go look at the footage from the trap shooting event, they tried doing it back over the shoulder and you literally couldn’t see anything. I could never tell what they were shooting, where they were shooting, if they hit anything, etc…
No the problem with the archery coverage was there was barely any. You were able to watch dedicated streams on peacock, but if you had no access to that you just couldn’t see the archery they don’t mention it during their main broadcasts. That’s the main problem with NBC’s broadcasts. It’s the Prime Time stuff where they’re supposed to show you what happened during the day. We’re talking about a place that’s half a day ahead of most of us time wise. A lot of the events took place at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. And the rest took place them very middle of the day. So prime time is how most people are going to see the Olympics. Yet The Prime Time barely shows actual Sports.
I’m not suggesting every shot be over the shoulder, but some variety of shots to emphasize the distance and size of the target would add some much needed perspective. The way it’s currently shot it feels like they’re 20’ away and shooting at large targets. It takes away from the impressive ability those archers have, IMO. You’d think they would have some dope tracking / zoom shots or something, it’s quite monotonous as it is now.
Well they did do shots where they showed the whole thing. They had a lot of sweeping shots that showed the size of the stadium and the length of the… i don’t know what they call it, gallery? So I don’t think it was ever a mystery. And they did constantly talk about that lining up two 747s wingtip to wingtip thing a lot. I think the vast majority of people watching archery, again because you have to go find it so it’s not for the Casual viewer, are pretty familiar with the distances. They also did have a pretty cool thing where they had a computer graphic trace the route of the arrow.
Highly highly disagree that it was monotonous though. There’s a lot of tension and anticipation to archery in the way they shot it and I think it comes off very well. I mean I was standing up and pacing half the time I watched it. There’s a lot of drama in archery.
they did constantly talk about that lining up two 747s wingtip to wingtip thing a lot.
Show, don’t tell. It’s a visual medium.
Highly highly disagree that it was monotonous though.
I’m referring to the camera work, not the competition.
I believe it actually showed a graphic of that plane thing. And like I said they show the entire course many times.
Highly highly disagree that it was monotonous though. There’s a lot of tension and anticipation to archery in the way they shot it and I think it comes off very well. I mean I was standing up and pacing half the time I watched it. There’s a lot of drama in archery.
Well, I disagree. Face, target. Face, target. Face, target. Check the link. That’s not dramatic IMO. Maybe it was just their YouTube videos but it left me wanting. Curling is 100x more dramatic than how they cut the archery footage together.
Oh well shit no wonder you think it’s boring. That wasn’t the broadcast. That’s like a recap highlight reel thing. That’s choppy as hell. Yeah if that’s what they actually showed I’d agree with you. When you watch the actual event the whole thing it’s a lot better. That’s not what I saw at all. Also the real announcers were way better. They were actually people who knew archery.
The television coverage may suck. I chose to spend the $12 to get ad free Peacock for a month and that has been great. Every event, ad free, with no fluff.
Without that, probably would have never watched my new favorite event, kayak cross.
I paid 12 dollars too and mine is full of ads.
Even without ads, I love the random breaks to show you what Paris looks like in the middle of Gold medal lifts. “We have to take a break” right as the athlete’s raising her bar so we can… Look at the Seine…
Olympics on Peacock premium plus is actually pretty good. Can select any event, sport, live or reply, skip / FForward ads, multiview events, gold zone view, standings, interviews, etc.
Prime time is shit, but most of it already happened so you can way h it in replays.
not sure what event you were watching but over the last two weeks i thought the coverage was actually pretty good. yes there is human interest stuff but i don’t think it has been egregious. some commercials side by side with live action, but also not too egregious.
that being said i am mostly watching live events during the day on youtube tv, not on peacock. also bouncing around between USA, E!, and the extra olympics channels. maybe it’s worse on NBC prime time and everything prerecorded.
incidentally youtube tv’s multiview has been clutch for the olympics.
I record everything on Plex off an antenna/hdhomerun and fast forward through all the cruft. We can watch about 3-4 hours of coverage each hour depending on the sport. There’s no way I could watch it live. Plex will get a bit confused about whether or not an episode is new or not, so to prevent it missing anything I post process each file into a new library and fix up the episode name with a timestamp. This does result in some repeated recordings, but we just delete any matches we’ve already seen. Been doing it this way for the last few Olympics and it’s manageable.
Some things I’ve learned about the olympics from the NBC coverage in the US.
There really not much happening there most of the time. So they have to fill the time with shots of US gymnasts drinking from water bottles and sitting around in their chairs, or of US runners standing around in the hallway before the race.
I’ve heard rumors of other sports, but it seems the only ones that really are going on are the ones that US competitors are dominating.
The US is the best at everything. Other countries make mistakes, but US competitors are always flawless and in the front.
There is a lot of beach volleyball happening all the time.
Why aren’t people getting vpn to have access to other country streams like cbc, bbc, and 9now so switching can be done if one countries stream doesn’t have access to an event? No commercials is awesome and lack of sob stories with direct feeds is divine.
I never get to see events that I want to watch. It was all swimming and gymnastics the first week and screw you if you wanted something else. And no, I’m not signing up for your streaming service.
They lost me at Hoda Kotbe.
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All the olympics sucks it is not even worth the watch and the stations always lose money. But I will say this the fast walk event I will watch and get excited for because its a bunch of sixty year olds trying to out fast walk the other all while trying not to run. And you can see them really trying not just to take off and run. It funny and awesome. I love the announcers during it because they have no clue on how to narrate it.
It doesn’t suck, it’s actually pretty interesting. I watched a ton of sports which I would never watch else. For example the discipline Breaking today. How amazing was that?
have no clue what your talking about…but I do watch boxing besides the Olympics because my brother is a professional