USA Sweep Womens Sabre
Saturday, August 9th, 2008I just finished watching the Womens Sabre finals on NBCOlympics.com. What an awesome event! Some very tense moments, too, but for the most part the streaming video worked beautifully (running Microsoft Silverlight, via Firefox 3 on a MacBook Pro over broadband). Congratulations to Mariel, Sada, and Becca! The most complete blog coverage is over at Fencing.net where Craig Harkins is live-blogging the event, with posts up minutes after each bout ends.
I do have a few issues with the NBC coverage though.
First, live streaming coverage is not available unless you have the most up-to-date high speed computer and internet connection. And I do mean FAST: they recommend a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM or Intel-based Macintosh, 768k broadband connection. It’s also been reported that Macs running on Power PC chips instead of Intel are out of luck.
Second, your cable company has to have some kind of agreement with NBC. That’s right, if you don’t enter the “correct” zip code and cable company on NBCOlympics.com, it may tell you that you can’t view live video because you don’t have the “right” cable company.
Another complaint is that NBC habitually cut away from LIVE ACTION to show a replay. How about picture-in-a-picture for the replay? Many critical points weren’t broadcast because of this problem.
Lastly, it was my understanding that at least the gold medal bout would be broadcast live on USA network, but they were too busy covering early-round women’s basketball. Are you telling me you can’t even stop watching basketball for ten minutes to watch an all-USA final? I’m told there was some quarterfinal coverage on USA last night, but NBC’s totally ignoring this match is really sad. I mean, what does US fencing have to do for some recognition here? I can only hope that as the day plays out that there will be a rebroadcast and lots of recaps. *
I can only hope that the future of Olympic coverage lies in the set-top boxes like Apple TV or Microsoft Media Center. It should look like this: a box that hooks up to your TV and streams live TV over broadband, with DVR capability, and access to any event at any time. The local agreements with different cable networks are patently unfair, as that means there are people with perfectly good money that want Olympic access that just aren’t going to get it.
If you’re outside the US, let us know how the coverage has been in your country. Men’s epee starts tonight at 10pm Eastern!
*Edit: The WS finals were broadcast at 4pm EST on MSNBC. It looked great, was broadcast in its entirety and they gave fencing a solid hour during a nice timeslot. Can’t complain too much except it would have been nice for NBC to post exactly when it was on rather than a generic 6-hour window for me to just guess at.
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