pics

I haven't watched the Olympics in a long time but I thought the experience was kinda shit, especially compared to ye olden days of it being on every channel. My experience was basically:

My wife: What's the difference between "Women's all around final" and "women's all around final (TV)"?

Me: googling I think we want the "TV" one?

30 second ad

20 seconds of a commentator talking over a view of Paris

2 minutes of ads

15 minutes of the camera just looking at an empty apparatus while there's clearly other stuff going on in the background

2 minutes ads

30 seconds commentators discussing the event

2 minutes ads

Ok they actually fucking start, finally

Someone does something, 2 second MICRO AD??? This is a thing now apparently? Randomly throughout there's these insanely short ads that are super jarring

Zoom in on Simone Biles face

Watch someone do a warmup on vault

Simone itches her nose

We can clearly hear other competitors doing things in the background, but Simone is looking to the right, so let's focus on that

2 minutes ads

Watch a competitor do uneven bars, neat

Back to Simone, she's talking to Suni now, we can't hear it, but it must be important

Literally can see people doing flips and shit in the background, but let's watch Simone as she sits in this chair

2 minutes ads

BREAKING NEWS: Simone blinks

"What did that other girl get for a score? Did they show it?"

Attempt to rewind 30 seconds. Big mistake, 2 minutes ads

Simone does a vault

2 minutes ads

...

Like I love Simone Biles, I do. Obviously I want to see all of her events. But holy shit, I'm here to watch the Olympics, not the "Simone is waiting for her turn" show. Also it was like 90% ads, they didn't even show some of the highest scoring performances (since they only showed like 3 other people besides Simone), and half the time didn't even show the scores they received. It was just..pretty bleh.

My two complaints about Peacock were:

1. Even taking the raw World feed there were often still segments cut out which I assume is where they ran ads. Watching replays with the “ad-free” plan there were no ads there, but the content was still gone.

2. Even though the entirety of the events were produced in 4K/UHD, only HD content was available. I understand that they did this because none of their broadcast facilities run in UHD yet and I guess they don’t have their streaming apps supporting it yet, but it’s definitely time for that to be supported. Claiming they don’t need to go UHD because their affiliates aren’t using ATSC 3.0 yet is patently false; the signal is live in my market and dozens of others as well.

That definitely needs to be fixed by Los Angeles, and really should be by Milano Cortina.

In Europe HBO covered it, I think you could even get a free trial during the Olympics if you didn't have an account from before. My partner has an account so I didn't check.

It worked great, and it was nice to easily change the language of the commentary. Really couldn't have asked for a better viewing experience, as I don't want public broadcasters to support this corruption shit show.

That said, it bothers me that it's impossible to find clips online.

Damn, the Olympics are free in Canada. The US needs to do the same.

That’s what I heard from friends who were watching, they said it was a massive improvement over the last Games.