Do almost 7,000 hours of Olympic coverage seem excessive to anyone?
If you are Olympics-averse and prefer to avoid the goings-on in Rio de Janeiro, you might need to inhabit a cave for the next two weeks.
First, confirm that your shelter has no Wi-Fi or cellphone service. We don’t mean man cave, or the female equivalent, but a room walled off from the multitude of contemporary news sources.
The Summer Games will be pelting us from all directions. NBC and its Duggar-sized family of affiliates are deploying every technological means at their disposal to inform and entertain.
From live streaming on desktops, tables and mobile devices to the results/video highlights app to special arrangements with Facebook, Snapchat, Buzzfeed, Instagram and Google, there will be no escape. Some competition can be absorbed in 4K ultra-high definition, whose resolution is four times clearer than that of the standard high-def format, and even through virtual reality.
A weary NBC employee assigned to add it all up arrived at a whopping figure: 6,755 hours of total viewing. About a third of it will involve Team USA breakout stars Simone Biles, a gymnast, and Katie Ledecky, a swimmer. Not really, but the pair will partake in multiple events, many of which should yield medals, and will emerge at the other end of this marathon as household names.
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The sum of TV hours represents a Beamon-esque leap from the measly 170 hours carried by the single NBC television platform two decades ago from Atlanta and is up 22% percent from the total for London four years ago.
TV watchers who have not trimmed their cable package or cut the cord entirely can sift among 11 channels. (OK, where in the heck is Bravo on the dial?)
Rio, which operates four hours ahead of Pacific time, offers the most TV-friendly time zone in the Summer Games since 1996.
The upshot is additional live coverage on NBC, the most-watched Olympic channel, compared to recent Games, though Pacific time zone residents are subjected to more tape-delay action than their Eastern counterparts. The network is adhering to the prime-time formula for usual programming by airing the 8 p.m. telecasts (7 p.m. on Sundays) three hours after the Right Coast gets to watch. More live should placate traditionalists who abhor the repackaging of events — spliced with canned athlete feature-ettes — on delay. Swimming coverage is designed for as-it-happens, at least for the East. However, gymnastics will be taped during the mornings and afternoons from Rio, then aired in the evenings.
The mini-profiles remain, though NBC vows they will no longer drag on anymore for up to four minutes. They will be less sappy, not tugging as much on the audience’s heartstrings with exaggerated tales of hardship.
As prime-time host Bob Costas said on a recent media conference call, “I think at one time [former NBC Sports chairman] Dick Ebersol, after we kind of saw the light, joked that we have now taken asthma off the list of potentially fatal diseases.”
Still, Costas sees merit in the pieces, saying, “A lot of them are quirky. A lot of them are funny. A lot of them are designed to give you a better idea of what [the athlete] is about.”
For all of NBC’s innovation, there is nothing nouveau about Costas, 64. The preternaturally youthful anchor has launched his 11th gig as night-time host, dating to when his coat lapels were so large that “you could land a small aircraft” on them, he recalled.
As his wardrobe has been updated, so has Costas’ awareness of advanced methods by which the public follows sports, especially the 30-ring circus that is the Olympics.
“People access content of all kinds in different ways now than they did only a few years ago,” Costas said. “But essentially, the heart and soul of this remains the same. It’s the storytelling and it’s the athletes.”
On the spectrum of American sports, the Games stand out as luring a predominantly female audience to the evening show on NBC. The coverage leans away from the Xs and O’s and toward the who’s and why’s. John Madden and his telestrator would not be a good fit.
The approach on other channels will hew more closely to the typical sports telecast. It is assumed that devotees who tune into rowing know the difference between a coxswain and a scull.
Viewers interested in a cross-section of sports on the NBC stations and those interested in sampling from the sweep of choices might need to crack open one month early the packet of AAA batteries stored for the remote control for football season.
Constant clicking is inevitable. It might take you until the closing ceremony to remember which stations focus on which sports or themes.
As for the use of supplementary devices such as laptop computers and cellphones to track the Games, executive producer Jim Bell cited research from 2012 concluding that such enthusiasts “actually watched more Olympics on television than people who just watched ,,, on television.
“That sort of marked them as super fans, and we’d like to see their ranks grow.”
Their number cannot help but expand, given the juggling act that viewers increasingly embrace while soaking in sports from the comfort of their living room.
All of you contrarians turned off by the spectacle, good luck finding that disconnected dead zone of a cave.
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