August 2008
20 posts
More details about NBC's online Olympics coverage
CNet offered several articles talking about Olympics coverage today:
An overview of the processes & systems being used for live online coverage
Notes on internet & journalism restrictions being imposed by the Chinese government
An overview of NBC’s online coverage plans
A few image previews
My top takeaways:
The “control room” portion of NBC’s specialized...
July 2008
11 posts
The oldest instrument and the Olympics...
As a fan of ancient Greek things and of the Olympics - ancient and modern - I loved this article: apparently, one of the functions of the world’s oldest-known scientific instrument was keeping a schedule of upcoming Olympic games.
Every Olympic year since at least 1992, I hear sports commentators (I listen to a lot of sports-talk radio during my commute) talk about how the Olympics...
NBC "live" coverage delay details...
Further details came out today about NBC’s Olympic live-coverage-that-isn’t-live. Apparently, “popular” events will be available online after the Pacific coverage of the event.
I’m probably reading too much into their wording, but I’m optimistically seizing onto their qualification of “popular” events, hoping that suggests that a large portion of...
Ghost Patrol
I haven’t posted about this before, but the puzzlehunt team that I captain, Meat Machine, spent a few weeks in late June/early July preparing an application for Ghost Patrol, a Ghostbusters-themed Game coming up in November (likely the only full-length Game of 2008).
A large part of the application was a “creative project” that could take one of three forms:
- building a...
Killing and Winning
Brad Feld posted today, adding to/agreeing with a sentiment expressed in an email by Jason Calacanis: basically wondering why, in the tech industry (and many other industries) competition gets framed as trying to “kill” other companies. Brad writes, “We as a industry are obsessed with death. And its a trap that clouds your thinking. Facebook did not kill MySpace, YouTube did...
Mark Cuban on small businesses
Mark Cuban wrote a post on small businesses today that resonated with a lot of people, myself included. The short version of his thesis is: to jumpstart the economy, remove the tax and regulatory/paperwork burdens on small businesses.
My wife Melissa ran a small business for five years, offering interior design consulting services. It’s currently dormant, primarily due to health issues,...
Tight security at the Beijing Games; US athletics...
This is too amusing not to post:
Included on the illegal items list for spectators at the Olympics next month are “crossbows and daggers”.
Also, I learned something new, which I thought I’d share, about qualifying rules for the USA Athletics (that’s the official name for what us Americans usually call “track & field”) squad, based on this story from...
NBC Olympic coverage, continued
More information coming out this week about NBC’s (TV and online) coverage of the Beijing Olympics: live coverage of every swimming final (nice) and live coverage of both men’s and women’s marathons (nice).
They’re reiterating that the 7-channel NBCU network will somehow average 212 hours of programming per day, which is more than 30 hours per day per network - somebody...
More on NBC's Olympics coverage
A funny statement about NBC’s coverage of the upcoming Olympics caught my eye today:
“NBC has scheduled 3,600 hours of Olympics programming on its main network, along with Telemundo, USA, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC and Bravo. That’s the equivalent of eight days of programming packed into each day.”
That’s impressive - not just the number of hours, but the fact that...
Trials coverage
Okay, instead of moaning about NBC’s online Olympics coverage before I actually see it and find out whether it’s any good or not, I’m going to complain about something I have seen: their Trials coverage.
The actual event broadcasting isn’t terrible. There are things I’d like see differently:
- I’d like to see more of the field events. I understand that live...
Online Olympics coverage: too good to be true
A week or so ago, I was getting excited about the rich online coverage NBC was going to offer for the upcoming Olympics. That coverage is apparently going to be a lot more restrictive than I had hoped. Two points to highlight:
1) Olympic video cannot be displayed on any website other than www.nbcolympics.com.
Sigh. Implications for NBC: your online viewership probably decreases (e.g.,...