The Beijing Olympic Games were just 19 months ago and yet NBC has apparently already forgotten what everyone bitched about or they frankly just don't give a shit. The year is currently 2010 and even more so than 2008 we have information at our finger tips at every second of the day. Many of spend hours at work surfing the internet where there is no possible way to avoid any "breaking news". Knowing the results of a sporting event kills the enjoyment of it all, and yet NBC continues in it's jackassery ways of Tape Delaying. Let's take yesterday for instance. I was home on my ass with the day off watching NBC's Olympic coverage. NBC showed two sports during their entire multiple hour long show. They showed Men's Snowboard Cross Qualifying / Time Trials and a Men's Cross Country Race. This is it and laughably only the Cross Country Race was shown live. Just in case you were not privied to watching these events, they are extremely dull and boring. Snowboard Cross is incredibly exciting, it's time trials are not. The time trials feature one racer at a time and essentially no crashes, it's basically downhill skiing minus 30 mph of velocity.
During the show I went to NBC's website and took a look at the sports schedule to find out what was actually going on. Low and behold the Snowboard Qualifying happened at 10 am Pacific and the actual exciting Snowboard X races were happening live at that moment but of course not on NBC. Instead I was forced to wait until NBC's evening showing where they spread out the entire competition over their 4 hour broadcast. If that wasn't bad enough NBC made it even worse. I spent hours watching meaningless Snowboard Cross Qualifying (32 of 36 Snowboarders Qualify for the actual races) and watched American Graham Watanabe qualify 2nd of the 36 competitors, so I was kind of intrigued on how he would do in an actual race. Well, I'm still intrigued because NBC didn't show the first round of races, they just told me that only 2 Americans advanced to the Quarterfinals. Essentially I sat through and watched a shitload of meaningless garbage and they couldn't even give me the common courtesy of showing what I actually wanted to watch on tape delay.
And that really is the simplest of the Tape Delay botching NBC pulls on a daily basis. How many millions of people in the United States knew Bode Miller won the Bronze when they actually showed it on television. The man was .02 away from the silver and .09 away from the gold. That screams drama, and yet when it actually took place, I was on my ass watching Tape Delayed Snowboard Cross Qualifying and Cross Country Skiing.
And hell we on the East Coast don't even get it half as bad as those on the West Coast. NBC is tape delaying EVERYTHING on the West Coast. They even tape delayed the opening ceremonies. Nothing is live. Do not use your internets if you don't want to know the results beforehand. It's so bad that NBC Networks are putting out releases that say this is corporate NBC's fault and not their own.
I'm certainly not the only one that thinks this is horseshit. Simply Google News "Tape Delay" or Google Blog Search it as well and you'll get a bevy of angry folks with a typewriter. To think it's just 19 months since every killed NBC for tape delaying everything and yet even when the games are on the same continent, they still find a way to fuck it up.
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