Word: nbc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...foremost problem with NBC's actual coverage is its length. Expanding Olympic coverage to a record 179 hours, NBC has eliminated the The Today Show, The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman from its lineup for two weeks, in addition to the entire prime time schedule and 4 to 5 p.m. daily. This is simply too much. No diehard Olympic fan could even dream of watching all this coverage. And once you've missed a little of the action, it becomes easier and easier to miss the whole show...
Viewers get the feeling that the Olympics are always on so they can tune in any time for a bit of the action. Like a sports MTV. And NBC emphasizes MTV-like viewing habits, by jumping in and out of different events in very short, song-length reports. If weightlifting is on, and you hate weightlifting, just sneeze or go to the bathroom, and you'll return to find the first heat of some swimming event...
...problem with this type of coverage is that NBC has eliminated the build-up of dramatic sports stories that are usually the most entertaining part of the Olympics. Instead of covering anything completely, they show everything incompletely...
...games so far has been Greg Louganis' gold medal victory in springboard diving after smashing his head on the diving board in a preliminary round. During his final dives, Louganis was forced into a split screen with a basketball game, whose announcers were doing the play-by-play. If NBC wanted to give us a sense that there is a lot going on at the same time, they succeeded. But who wants to hear about a missed free throw in the first few minutes of a basketball match when one could be concentrating on the world's finest diver...
...NBC is going to continue with half-screen coverage and tedious events, it may as well go ahead with its aborted plan to split the screen between sports and commercials. We still wouldn't get a close look at the Games, but at least we wouldn't have to watch the ads either...