Sunday, August 5, 2012

Things to fix on Olympic broadcasts

The 2012 London Olympics are past the half way point. Let me point out (as a fan and watcher) more than a few things that need to be fixed. Some are on the Olympic Broadcasting Company (the "host feed" if you will) and some are on NBC (the American broadcaster).

  • In individual and double head-to-head sports (such as tennis), ALWAYS include the player's name(s) and country. use the space available on the screen. In sports where the athletes are known, we want to know who they are. In any Olympic event with one or two players per side, the players' names should be made known.
  • In swimming, I like the usage of showing the countries and what place they're in (i.e. 1st at the touch, 1st, 2nd, 3rd at the finish), but in the medal races, it should indicate the medal colors with the places (i.e. 1st in gold, maybe with OR or WR, 2nd in silver, 3rd in bronze). Track (Athletics) should do the same.
  • In track, there should be a digital line showing the finish line since the camera angle doesn't seem to be perfectly aligned on it. Actually, do this for any event with a finish line so that it stands out.
  • I saw in swimming online a graphic that showed the order of touch on the wall with the time behind the leader the first 3 positions were. I didn't see this graphic on NBC. It would be very helpful.
  • In doubles, leave spaces around the "/" between the names to make it more readable. Create space to show the names properly.
  • NBC - it's ok to package things for primetime, but let us watch live on cable too. It should help overall more than it hurts.
  • The horses should be moved to Oxygen exclusively (NBC still owns that channel, right?). They did that once, i think. Tennis has its own channel, and it works.
  • If there's a soccer match on the Soccer channel, unless it's Team USA, don't show it on MSNBC/NBCSN. Take that time to show either another soccer match, or another sport. Give the other sports some more love.
  • Online (NBCOlympics.com), tell us which feeds have NBC announcers, which ones have other announcers, and which ones have no announcers (I saw it's a choice in some feeds to hear the host feed in English, Spanish, or the natural audio once you're listening to it). And don't hide the announcers on rewinds/replays.
  • And put the NBC network feed online too. How does it hurt? I saw it on the middle weekend, but not during the week. The difference, the middle weekend, NBC was live coast-to-coast, but during the week, it's tape delayed out west. I can get NBC for free with an antenna, so the online advertising won't hurt that.
  • In tennis, and other set-based events, show the scores of each set instead of the number of sets won. I've seen that problem in tennis broadcasts outside of the U.S. outside of the Olympics. Sometimes they do it "right", and sometimes they hide the player's name and scores from other sets. No rhyme or reason to it.
  • On swimming, and probably track, either NBC or the Olympic Broadcasting host feed needs to mark somewhere on the screen which event this is (especially the race's length). Say it's the 100M freestyle (or at least say it's a 100M race).
  • For the love of God, why do we have Ryan Seacrest? And Michelle Beadle should get the midday shift on NBCSN so more people can see her.
  • Michelle Beadle should not have been used in a time slot when few people were watching. I like waking up to her, but she's off the air not long after that, and the west coasters don't even get that much of her. She should have the NBCSN mid-day slot after Willie Geist (seriously, Jim Lampley wasn't available?).

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