Watching the Olympics

I'm just thinking here, as the next Olympic games are about 7 1/2 months away. NBC has the opportunity to air A LOT of live coverage to the entire nation, instead of packaging up the sports for primetime. The games are in Vancouver, 3 hours behind the majority of NBC's audience.

So they should show (almost) everything LIVE. And this is how...

Say action starts at 9am PT (some may be in the hour before it, most will be later on). There goes NBC's morning show for the East Coast.
• Show a recap of the previous night at 10am ET/7am PT on NBC's East Coast feed and USA's West Coast feed. The morning recap kicks off a very long day on what I'll call a "single feed".
• Live action starts, so start showing it on the "single feed". Live action continues probably until midnight PT/3am ET. Have one single feed to show it live. You'll see how it works in a moment.
• NBC has broadcast "windows" that they want to air Olympic programming in, and those are treated like entertainment programming (8pm ET/PT, so the West Coast viewers are 3 hours behind on what they see) instead of sports programming (8pm ET/5pm PT, where everyone sees it at the same time). Usually 10am-1pm weekdays, 10am-6pm weekends, and 8pm-12am and 12:30am-2am nightly.

  The "single feed" starts at 10am ET/7am PT and ends at 3am ET/12am PT. NBC East shows it live from 10am-1pm ET, and then NBC West shows it live from 10am-1pm PT (1pm-4pm ET). They both see different live events (and recaps) during the day. So viewers don't miss anything, use USA's East and West coast feeds to show the "single feed" when NBC isn't showing it.

• Basically, the entire continous 17 hour live feed (including the recap of the night before) is available on either NBC or USA.
• MSNBC and CNBC, Bravo, Oxygen, and the other NBC Universal cable channels can also show programming, as they've been doing for NBC, and USA can have an additional feed on weekends for the couple hours that both of NBC's feeds are on the air at the same time.

Problem solved!