I worked on the BBC's British coverage of Sydney, Salt Lake City and Athens Olympics (2000-2004).

The sibling comments here are absolutely right - the US coverage is terrible compared to the quality of the output of other broadcasters.

The problem is that US audiences only want to watch American competitors and most popular sports here are ones where the majority of teams and players are American. The Olympics isn't about one country and so to focus all of your coverage just on your own country creates a very tilted output, esp when America isn't featured in a final. Whole sports are not covered because there is no American competing, and to not show a final because no Americans made it through is just absurd.

For comparison, the BBC shows every heat/round from every sport. Some of it is online only or via the red button (extra channels via digital TV we don't have in the US) but they show it and commentate on it. And with no ads.

Sports like Formula 1 are not popular in the US because there are no American drivers and the single American team is hardly American (based in Europe, currently has Russian flag livery due to weird sponsorship deal). But we'll know when Americans start watching sports for the pleasure of competition and not for nationalistic reasons because sports like F1 will become more popular organically.

> The problem is that US audiences only want to watch American competitors

I think there's a [citation needed] here. This is what people think is true, but I'd argue is wrong--as evidenced by a collapse in viewership!

People want entertainment that is fun and emotional, and the US coverage isn't providing that, perhaps because they are constrained by thinking that US audiences only care about US athletes.

I agree, I want to watch the Olympics, and not Figure Skating. I know events are basically happening all the time, but for some reason I can only watch a couple events from 8pm - 11pm my time. Of that block, 50% is devoted to commercials or random "interest" stories where I learn about one of the athlete's sick horses. When I actually can see an event, I'm forced to endure the "insightful commentary".

i deeply agree with this

> The problem is that US audiences only want to watch American competitors

Is this an established fact, or just a widespread belief among US broadcasters?

And yes, the BBC Olympics coverage is awesome. During the London games, I chose to pay for a proxy service so that I could use iPlayer and catch the BBC rather than suffer through NBC's useless attempt.

F1 has a problem (if you want to call it that) where it's not in my timezone. I wake up on the west coast USA and an entire race will have started and finished while I was asleep.

We use a VPN to watch on the BBC for just this reason. The BBC hosts don't over analyze the coverage and the focus is on the competitors and they don't create artificial drama. Their para-Olympics coverage is top notch too.

Forgot to add advertising in the US is out of control.

Agree completely. The reasons I think are:

- America has just so many participants so it makes some sense that 100% coverage is on US athletes

- too much focus on personal side of things (X just had a baby etc.) is becuase US gets regular news-people/non-expert commentators. Since they don't often know much about the sport, they make everything into a personal interest stories.

How other countries do it:

- focus on the sport

- former athletes of the sport in question are brought in

US coverage is less fun because they focus on US athletes all the time, even when they are not participating. So if there's no swimming on, instead of watching some random-ass sport--which is fun--we have to watch a random human interest story--which is not fun.

Obviously they should cover US athletes when they are participating but they cover them all the time. It's just more boring.

The best Olympic coverage I’ve seen was the NBC HD broadcast of the 2002 Salt Lake City winter games. HD was still pretty new in the US. They didn’t have many HD cameras and they didn’t have an HD workflow integrated with the SD broadcast, so it was completely separate from the “overcoming adversity USA athlete” coverage.

For example, they set up the HD cameras and trailer at the ski jumping venue. They showed ski jumping start to finish—all the competitors real-time without editing. The commentators were ski jumping experts, since the professional commentators were all off on the SD feeds. Almost no breaks because they only had one HD commercial.

I learned so much about the sport and cheered for competitors from random countries. It was miles beyond the standard NBC coverage and probably even better than watching it in person.

20 years later and it’s the most memorable Olympics-watching experience of my life, going back my earliest memory of the jetpack in ‘84.

So much this! It was amazing. I remember just hooking up an antenna to get the broadcast and just keeping my TV tuned to the Olympics.

Unfortunately, the networks have gotten "smarter". I can watch things in 4k this year, but it's the traditional coverage, so it's crap content with 4k and HDR. :(

The best coverage I've experienced was the 2012 London Summer Olympics on Youtube. Continuous multiple live streams, could select any event going on to watch it live. I don't think there were ads in the stream (don't remember though).

Non live coverage is so dumb. Nobody wants to watch the World Cup or the Super Bowl with a 12 hour delay

I am in a similar situation, except the country where I come from usually makes it to the top 5-10. I have been surprised by how poor the coverage of the Olympics is here in the US: only sports where the US have a change of medals, don't bother to show the finale if the American contestant(s) has been eliminated in the semi, constant ad breaks and ad integrations. Almost unwatchable. And so antithetic to what the idea of the Olympics should be: bringing nations together and competing for the beauty of the sport and of the performances of the athletes. Coubertin, who founded the Olympic Committee said "L'important, c'est de participer" (roughly: "the important thing is to participate")

I tend to agree with this. I live in the UK and they don’t have too many athletes at the winter Olympics which makes the coverage more diverse in terms of sports and more importantly, athletes. This is very different from summer Olympics where the UK have more active participants making the coverage way less enjoyable.