Why We Love, and Hate, NBC's Olympic Coverage

Some of our readers have suggested that our repeated criticism of NBC's coverage of the Olympics reveals some sort of bias against Jeff Zucker and his people. Not at all. We just want to watch the Olympics when the rest of the world does, and don't see why the network won't let us.

Again, we understand that NBC paid a fortune to air the games, and wants to squeeze every penny out of every second it can. But we don't think that streaming every event on the Web precludes them from doing that. If we're not interested enough to watch it in prime time, keeping it off the the Web won't make us watch. And if we are interested? Well, we'll watch on both.

Today's example: Yesterday's example, really -- the thrilling men's 4x100 freestyle relay. Apparently this aired live on NBC sometime in the wee hours last night or early this morning, well after we were asleep. But we've been hearing about it all morning (spoiler alert!) and now we've watched the tape on NBCOlympics.com (again, the video quality is awesome). And it is so exciting that if we knew NBC was going to be showing the highlights on its broadcast tonight, we'd tune in, just so we can see it on a big (comparatively) screen.

See how easy that is? And believe us, it's much easier to watch the NBC feed, which has nice graphics and announcers that put the event in context, than it is to watch a grainy Saudi TV feed. But if NBC isn't delivering the goods -- letting us watch what we want, when we want -- than that's what we'll do.

Why We Love, And Hate, NBC's Olympic Coverage