Winter Olympics 2010 - Vancouver - BBC TWO/HD/RB/OL/IP

There's not really such a thing as traditional, the situation has evolved gradually throughout the years.

Looking at http://www.obs.es/olympicbroadcastinghistory.html
domestic host broadcasters were used until 1992 when it was decided that the host did not need to come from the country concerned. In 2002 the IOC took responsibility for finding the host broadcaster for 2002 and 2004 and chose a private company to do it.

In 2001 they formed OBS and they took over the job from Beijing onwards - in Beijing it was called BOB, looks like London is OBSL and Vancouver it's OBSV

NBC messing up their Olympic coverage as usual:
http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-01-30/sports/17841369_1_nbc-sports-president-nbc-broadcasters-dick-ebersol

And to think I was annoyed we'd lost our second interactive stream on Freeview - NBC viewers only get two hours during the day, though they do carry coverage on 4 or 5 cable channels.

Would like to see ABC/ESPN though snatch the 2014/2016 rights just to shake things up in America as they have pledged to broadcast more live, so it would be interesting to see if they treated it as other countries do and broadcast everything live regardless of what time of day that ends up falling. NBC still treat it the same way they did in 1996 and haven't really factored in the effect of the internet in how news can not be controlled now by a network.


Not so keen on that - no where near as nice as the ones for Turin four years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWvkqKCvlxk

Excellent Opening Ceremony having fun without regimentation.

The BBC have done the Bob/Luge in the past (but suspect they aren't hosting this year) - they certainly did it at Lillehammer. ISTR that there were two major reasons - one technical, one production.

1. They had (and SISLive still have) world-renowned expertise in little cameras (so could embed cameras in the course), and with an eye to innovation had seen the benefit of using the Sony-T7/T70 split camera (full-sized BVP 7/70 block and lens but removed from the main camera body) which gave you something small but with a full quality picture and was perfect for whip-pans as the competitors passed. (Imagine a normal hand held camera - but with the main camera body on the end of a cable, and just the lens, viewfinder and a small block with the optical assembly that you actually use to capture images)

2. The BBC had a reputation for excellent coverage of Motorsport (the actual race coverage in the days before F1A provided it), with much pacier coverage than most other host broadcasters. Because the Bob/Luge are so fast, with an incredibly high cut-rate to get exciting coverage, the same director/vision mixer (he cut his own mix ISTR) was used.

Yep - given that they're saying that they're losing $250m on their Winter Olympics coverage I can understand why they're not showing more (and thus losing more...) The rights were bought a few years ago now, and the advertising downturn has hit them hard.

In the UK we have a public service broadcaster (as most European countries do) with the Olympic rights who don't have to make a commercial return on the money they've paid for the rights. NBC have to make as much money as possible on their rights to minimise their losses, and the local affiliates on the West Coast are very unhappy about live coverage impinging on their local news slots (which generate a LOT of money in advertising) NBC's decisions are entirely about making the most money possible - not serving the public. For some reason some US commentators think this isn't the case when it comes to some events... If you base your TV model on an entirely commercial set-up in the mainstream - this is the inevitable result.

(I know a lot of American sport fans wish they had Canadian TV...)

Very surprised to see CTV are covering the Olympics in Canada rather than CBC. Any idea why?

People might be interested in this blog on 'Live Design' about the A/V setup at the venues (they also have plenty on the show control systems for Beijing too.)

I guess they paid more?

I thought the sound quality on the BBC broadcast was very very poor, especially that of the singing in the stadium. The Eurosport coverage was of a much better sound quality.

I second that, the whole first part of the ceremony was ruined by the stadium sound being louder and ahead of the direct audio feed, with the commentators briefly becoming very quiet as it was fixed.

Otherwise it was an excellent opening ceremony, simple yet effective.

Presumably one issue is that the BBC commentators are probably in the stadium (in a very loud environment), whereas Eurosport probably have their commentators either in an off-tube booth at the IBC or even commentating from back in Europe? If Eurosport actually are at the venue, they don't have to worry about appearing on-camera do they?

There may also be issues if the BBC is mixing between multis and unis coming via different paths and with different delays.