More Coverage of the Olympics, PLEASE!
So, it’s the Winter Olympics! Are you excited? I know I am. I’m actually most excited for Curling, Alpine Skiing, and Speed Skating…
Which brings up an interesting concern I’m seeing more and more with the olympics. NBC’s coverage. NBC has mentioned a few times that they’re losing money, and viewers during their coverage of the Vancouver 2010 olympics this year. And I feel like they’re not covering enough of the events. I mean, the Olympics is much larger than the portion they cover during primetime, or in the few other channels that show coverage sporadically. I’m sure there’s plenty of Americans that want to watch events that actually don’t involve a medal-contender US Athlete.
For instance, I was watching curling a little bit this afternoon, with USA playing Germany. USA lost 7-5, and most of the other curling events were done, except for the Canadian team, facing Norway, and the game was tied 6-6 heading into Extra Ends… Close, and had to be exciting to watch… But they didn’t cover it and instead went into 15 minutes of talking and commercials… Time they could’ve spent covering the curling match.
That lack of coverage is what frustrates me. And my friend Jose and I were talking a little last night about what they could do to enhance coverage, and perhaps enhance even their profit…
Why isn’t there an Olympic “Premium” network for times like these? Similar to MLB Extra Innings, or the NFL Network. I would love to see something like 5 channels playing 24/7 coverage of the Olympics when they happen. That would be incredible. Even have an online version so you can login with your same account to watch it online if you’re not near a computer.
That’d be just plain perfect. Do it just like MLB.TV currently has… pay a certain fee for the “Season” (in this case, the 2-3 weeks of Olympics every 2 years), and you’d get access to 24/7 coverage. That shouldn’t be hard to maintain at all, no? Please, correct me if I’m wrong.
This way, you can cover CERTAIN events that you know that your mainstream viewers would like to watch (like USA vs Canada hockey, and Figure Skating), but any of the olympic fans that want more than that, can pay for it. It’s a small fee (I don’t know, 40-50 bucks?)
Hell, personally, I wouldn’t even care if there were announcers or not. Atleast show me the game statistics on the screen. But that’s a personal preference that I’m sure not many others would stand by. I just suggest the lack of announcers as an attempt to cut down on production costs.
Is this too far fetched of an idea? Would you be willing to pay for “premium” access to the Olympics?
Premium Coverage counts as this:
- 24/7 Channels (I’m thinking atleast 3 of them would be required)
- Access to ALL events online (so if the event/match you want to watch doesn’t fit into one of the channel slots, you can still watch it online)
Again, I think this is completely reasonable and far from unachievable.
And there is another plus to this whole thing: Your current audience. The one that doesn’t care about the olympics and is disappointed that their “regularly scheduled programming” disappeared for the next 2 weeks? They don’t need to worry about that ANYWHERE near as much as they do now, as NBC would be taking over their main networks for coverage of the Olympics far less.
Is there any restrictions that the IOC place on this kind of solution? The only thing that I could think of as to why NBC hasn’t done this yet is if perhaps they’ve been told the olympics must be free to everyone, in the spirit of the Olympic games being for everyone.
What do you think? What do you KNOW that I don’t and that I need to learn? Give me some comments!
A Collection of Thoughts.
Well. I purchased my first home on Friday. A nice two bedroom townhouse in North Tampa. Man, do I feel overwhelmed though, now that I’ve spent a couple days wandering around the place. I’m looking at what needs to be done, what needs to be fixed, where I need to paint (uhh… EVERYWHERE, almost?). I’m just realizing how big of a job I have ahead of me. I really have no motivation to do it, and that’s my problem so far, lol. I should just take the next month off of work (wouldn’t that be nice) and start taking care of everything.
I noticed that one of the toilets doesn’t work (the stopper when the toilet is refilling isn’t cutting off the water flow when it should be.)… and that I have a ceiling fan in the living room that is running for the foreseeable future until I get a step ladder so I can actually stop it…
Walking through the community on Sunday, however, I’m definitely very happy with my purchase, though. It’s very nice! I think I’ll get along well with my community, but we’ll see 
I’ll need to socialize! *gasp* I spent some time around the community pool with my cousin, he was my first “guest” to the house, even though it’s still empty. Hanging around the pool was great.
My trip to Canada and Massachusetts was absolutely awesome, and relaxing. Canada was so much fun, and so beautiful (I really do love Magog, just a small quaint town that’s still large enough for my tastes). My time in Massachusetts was basically read my books all morning, then go out during the afternoon/night. It was definitely relaxing, and much needed, especially since as soon as I got back into Florida it was running around while I closed on the condo and went to work. All over the damn place!
I really did have to go Cold Turkey when it came to technology while I was up in Canada. There was no way I wanted to accrue international charges. At first I was going to turn off my phone for the entire 3 days. But then turned my phone onto Airplane mode so I could at least play with the games on it, lol…
Of course, the running around is only getting worse as I realize everything that I have before me. I still have to make sure multiple places have my new address, not to mention some of those places I don’t even think have my new phone number (changed that like a month ago)… My old job in MA never contacted me back about my 401k, which is annoying, so I’m not too sure what to do there. But I guess it’s something I don’t need to fidget with right away.
I’m very relieved to finally have this blog back up and running, and I don’t believe any of the styling is out of place anymore. We’ll see how it goes. I HAVE noticed that the images from the previous blog posts are missing, so I know I need to figure out how I want to upload those again to make sure everything is back to normal.
So… How about them Red Sox? I am absolutely appalled by the sudden disastrous loss to the Yankees (we were SWEPT in a 4 game series???? WTF!)… What went wrong? What is Francona doing to remedy the situation? We need a turn around, and SOON. I could not believe the Sox went from 8-0 vs the Yankees this year, to 8-4, so quickly… JEEZ.
Guess that’s all I have in my mind for now.
Well, that was fun.
Apologies for the past week everyone.
I still don’t quite know what happened. Somewhere along the way my template (among other things) went to hell. The domain was having trouble getting renewed so even though my blog went down and I tried my hardest to fix it before going on vacation, the domain went down too! So frustrating!
Thankfully, over the last week, the domain came back into my possession, and I finally have a chance to attempt to get everything back rolling. Working with a coworker I discovered that for some reason, my theme is broken. I will be attempting to fix that today, and hopefully I’ll have that up and running so everything looks fine again.
This really is frustrating. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. However, thankfully, I managed to keep it out of my mind during my vacation and I did have a very relaxing, enjoyable vacation and I can’t wait to go back to Canada again. Such a good time, there AND in Massachusetts.
Here’s hoping my “sexy” Blackened Sun theme is up and running again by the end of today.