Olympic Rants

OK so I wanted to address something to you all that is to do with the Olympics. A lot of people on the Internet have ranted about the Olympics sucking and to be honest, I don't really see the point of ranting. If you don't like the Olympics, then don't watch it. Its that simple. But no it goes further. The next thing is what NBC did for their coverage of the opening ceremony. Now as I'm a British citizen, I watched the BBC's coverage which despite the very odd and somewhat silly (at certain points) commentary, they manged to show it very well without any major flaws as such. So this is what NBC did:

On Wikipedia it says:

Criticism was levelled at NBC's coverage of the ceremony, mainly of the decision to tape-delay its broadcast of the opening and closing ceremonies and not make a live version available even to cable and web users, along with its frequent interruption of the ceremony with commercial breaks. Many US viewers resorted to looking for alternative ways of watching the Olympics aside of NBC (such as the live BBC feed for the opening ceremonies), despite both NBC and the IOC vowing to crack down on such unauthorised streams. More significant criticism was levelled at NBC for cutting to a Ryan Seacrest interview with Michael Phelps during the "memorial wall" tribute section. An NBC spokesman said the network left that segment out because its Olympic programming was "tailored for the U.S. audience." There was also criticism of the apparent belief of Today Show hosts and commentators Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira that the Queen had actually jumped out of a helicopter. There was an indication that Vieira did not know who Tim Berners-Lee was, stating during commentary to the television audience, "If you haven't heard of him, we haven't either", before co-host Matt Lauer told the audience to Google the inventor of the World Wide Web. These failings were picked up during the NBC broadcast by users of Twitter with the hashtag #nbcfail.


After reading this, I feel that NBC obviously have ruined the ceremony for every single viewer that they had by not doing a live version and have frequent ad breaks which as everyone knows, shouldn't happen in an event such as this. Also the commentators obviously didn't know how action films are made seeing as they thought the real Queen jumped out. They is no way in hell that a 86 year old woman with much importance to the country, would actually jump out because of the risks of it can be fatal (same goes to Daniel Craig, the current James Bond). Next is the interview being used instead of showing the memorial. That of all things, is just unbelievably disrespectful towards the UK, especially as it was something that is very important and emotional for the country. I hope that whatever NBC do, they will acknowledge the fact that they lost many viewers because of that. Now, the last thing that they did was not knowing who was Sir Tim Berners-Lee was. He's the creator of the World Wide Web which if we didn't have, the world would just be plain boring.


Despite everything that I just said, the Olympics aren't all that bad. Sure the actual sports may be boring to watch after a while and sure, this year's Opening Ceremony didn't make sense for a lot of people (mainly those who live outside the UK), but ranting about it will get you nowhere. If you want or don't want to watch it, that's your choice, no one is stopping you. But please, just don't rant about it because you'll just be wasting your time with it.