“You Brits are sooo arrogant”

Dear United Kingdom, You can be our colonial masters again if you bring @BBC #Olympics coverage with you. Love, America. — notLikeNormalPeople ‏@notlikenormal

Funny thing #NBCfail, the ads never freeze like your pathetic live stream does. You are abominable. I’d be fired if I did my job like you. — Steve Weinstein ‏@steveweinstein

I am starting to think NBC is intentionally nuking their streaming of events that will be tape-delayed. — Jeb ‏@tatsumaki4ryu

@TVvInce I am adopting the NBC approach to breaking news: my actual article will go up an hour or so after Twitter has learned about it. — Guy Adams ‏@guyadams

And while away on commercial break, NBC Sports Network missed Japan’s second goal. — Steven Goff ‏@SoccerInsider

It started off well enough.

Thanks to our dysfunctional public transport system I was queueing at Guildford Station to buy a ticket, even though I had completed my journey.

In front of me was an American woman, before her a young girl.

The girl had a Union Jack (British flag) painted on her cheek.

American woman: Are you going to see the Olympics?

Young girl: Yes.

American woman: What to see?

Young girl: Basketball.

American woman: Who is playing?

Young girl: Team GB and USA.

American woman: Will you be cheering the American team?

Young girl: No!

That did it. The American woman then tried to impress all with the fact that she had been at college with top basketball players and named at least one of them who was seven foot tall.

Does he drop the ball in the net?

What she did not seem to realise is that Brits have zero interest in basketball.

She then proceeded to slag off the BBC London 2012 Olympic coverage, their commentary was awful as they did not know what they were talking about (they referred to The Ukraine), and that NBC was vastly superior.

Really, NBC vastly superior!

NBC does not show the coverage live, instead it is delayed three hours for the East Coast, six hours for the West Coast.

When this was pointed out to her the reaction was, so. It seemed lost on her that the rest of the world saw it live.

And as for the commentary:

The opening ceremony was chatted over the top, as too difficult for an American audience to understand, Brunel was referred to as George Washington. Who is Tim Berners Lee? The tribute to the victims of the London 7/7 bombings was cut. Australia was apparently somewhere in the middle of Europe. Small countries were where the terrorists came from.

Last weekend the cycle route through the Surrey Hills was apparently lined with châteaus.

Such has been the almost exclusive focus on American athletes, that one person asked on #NBCFail had all the other athletes gone home after the opening ceremony.

Americans have been using the net to watch BBC because NBC coverage is so bad.

NBC has pointed to viewing figures but these are meaningless when NBC has a broadcast monopoly for which it paid a staggering $1 billion.

When Guy Adams, a journalist on The Independent, slammed NBC for their abysmal Olympic coverage, he had his twitter account suspended (now reinstated).

It was suggested to the American she watched through the net (she was complaining a limited choice), she said she had not internet. A little backward, no internet.

When a few of these points were made to her, her response was: You Brits are sooo arrogant!

A bit rich, an American calling Brits arrogant. The pot calling the kettle black?

She fortunately shut up. But at least she kept the queue amused whilst we patiently waited our turn to buy a ticket.

Brits get the BBC, which unlike NBC is there to serve its viewers not the markets. Brits also get free health care too, hence the NHS featuring in the London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony.

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#NBCFAIL Abysmal London 2012 coverage by NBC

twitter fail

London 2012 twitter fail

London 2012 NBC greed

London 2012 NBC fail

NBC tape delay coverage is like the airlines: its interest is in giving you the least satisfactory service you will still come back for. – James Poniewozik, Time magazine TV critic

Who is running NBC? It appears to be entering the final for Olympic reputational meltdown in several categories at once. — julia hobsbawm

If we cannot rely on Twitter to protect our free speech, then it is no platform at all. #twitterfail #nbcfail. Prove me wrong, please. — Jeff Jarvis

If there was a gold medal for bad TV coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games then NBC would be the winner.

The delay to viewers is so bad that it is better to get live coverage on twitter.

Why a delay? Well it is all about greed. Slip in a few commercials, well actually quite a lot of commercials, 20 minutes of commercials per hour, and show at peak viewing times not when the events take place, then just to rub the viewers nose in it, announce the results on news bulletins before you show the ‘live’ event.

The opening ceremony was not streamed online.

One blogger had this to say:

I still haven’t seen the opening ceremony from Beijing (same reasons, same perp), and I missed the one last night too. Well, I didn’t miss it exactly. When my tweet stream started lighting up late yesterday afternoon with visions of giant babies and Voldemort and flying bicycles and all the other British trippiness I ran to my TV. Work can wait, I want to see this! But I was blocked at every turn. Like an Iranian dissident I finally managed via a secret proxy to get a glimpse. But it lasted only a moment before some well-compensated gatekeeper sussed it out and blocked my subversive stream. I couldn’t deal with the asymmetry of the commentary without the thing, so I just shut down Twitter. Did you know that the in order to use the official iPhone and iPad apps from NBC to live stream events you have to subscribe to a particular set of cable companies, and furthermore you have to be subscribed to a short list of pay channels? The web is no more an open network. It has been reduced (and diminished) to mere media pipe that connects (only) to your monopoly owned app – It’s like the AT&T of old.

For the opening ceremony, instead of letting viewers sit back and enjoy it, they had to chat over the top. The assumption being the average American is too stupid to know what is going on (possibly true).

Not that the NBC presenters actually knew what they were talking about.

The appearance of Brunel: Oh my God, what is George Washington doing there?

For Tim Berners-Lee: Who is he?

I have paraphrased, but you get the gist and yes, it was this bad.

But the worst gaffe of the opening night was extremely offensive. The day after London was awarded the 2012 Olympic Games, bombs went off in London, on the Tube and on a bus.

I travelled on the affected Tube line not long after and it was like travelling on a ghost train.

NBC edited out a tribute to those who were killed by the 7/7 bombings!

• Here’s The Opening Ceremony Tribute To Terrorism Victims NBC Doesn’t Want You To See

Now imagine had it been the other way around, the Olympics had been held in New York (God forbid) and the BBC had edited out a tribute to the victims of the 9/11 plane crashes.

We know what would have happened. All hell would have broken out.

The focus in the US has mainly been on the atrocious coverage, but for the treatment of the victims of 7/7 all I can express is disgust. It is difficult to see how NBC could have sank so low. And to date they have failed to apologise, merely come out with pathetic excuses.

Such though has been the outcry at their failings there is now a twitter hashtag of #nbcfail for people to use when venting their frustration on NBC.

What has been the reaction of NBC, have they got their act together? No, Instead they have run crying to twitter to have critical accounts blocked and twitter to their shame have acceded to the request.

Guy Adams, Los Angeles bureau chief for The Independent, lost access to his Twitter account because he revealed the corporate email address of an NBC executive Gary Zenkel (Gary.Zenkel@nbcuni.com) on Twitter after complaining about the network’s Olympic coverage, he savaged NBC for making people on the West Coast wait six hours to watch the opening ceremonies and shared NBC Olympics.

People posting hate tweets and using twitter to abuse people is ok, but use your twitter account to highlight that NBC is not up to the job and your account gets blocked.

The same treatment has been meted out by twitter to those critical of the Olympic Games.

So much for twitter promoting free speech and being a neutral platform.

Twitter is now coming under as much fire as NBC. And deservedly so.

What we are seeing once again is the obscenity and all pervasive stench of corporate sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympics. The parent company of NBC is one of the corporate sponsors.

Corporate sponsors of London 2012 Games do not own the Games, even though they behave as though they do.

Unlike the backward NBC which has nothing but contempt for its viewers and free speech, the BBC is trialling the broadcast of the future.

The 1948 Olympics saw outside broadcast TV. The 1984 Olympics saw HD which only now is coming into widespread use.

For London 2012 BBC is filming in Super High Vision (16x resolution of HD) and with 22.1 sound channels.

The difference between the BBC was expressed eloquently by Jeff Jarvis:

BBC is supported by its viewers’ fees. So the argument is that the BBC serves viewers because they’re the boss while NBC serves advertisers because they pay the bills.

For one the guiding principle is public service, the other it is greed.

That is why the bandcamp model works so well for musicians. If people listen, share and download music, the musicians do well, if the musicians do well, bandcamp does well.

Media savvy users in the US are turning their backs on the crap NBC London 2012 coverage and using TunnelBear and StreamVia to access the BBC superior coverage.

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