Olympics viewers overloaded with commercials during NBC Olympic Opening Ceremony

by
in sports on (#1PMZM)
During the Olympic opening ceremonies, NBC may very well stand for "Nothing But Commercials". Viewers took to Twitter to slam the network's frequent commercial breaks after six commercial breaks in under 40 minutes. Inserting commercials is probably the reason that NBC did a tape delay of the opening ceremony.

NBC has also been inserting commercials while matches are taking place over the first two days of the women's and men's Olympic soccer tournaments, prompting anger from many. And yet NBC has billed this as the 'Most Live Olympics Ever' despite the one hour broadcast delay for the opening ceremony.
Reply 5 comments

what opening ceremony (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2016-08-06 05:09 (#1PNA6)

haven't even seen anything about it starting yet

didn't they cancel it due to zika?

Entirely typical... (Score: 4, Insightful)

by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2016-08-06 05:57 (#1PNCE)

"Opinionated fools on Twitter complain about something" isn't much of a news story. The extremely partisan blog with a lot of bile-spewing political comments is rather a cesspool, too.

Let's see the real story:
the first 40 minutes of the Opening Ceremonies included 14 minutes of commercials
Even those cherry-picked number are only a hair worse than every other ad-supported TV program in the US (~18 minutes of commercials per hour is typical), and sporting events are usually worse, getting extra commercial breaks wherever the opportunity presents itself. It wouldn't likely be any different on CBS, ABC, Fox, etc.

Re: Entirely typical... (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2016-08-06 23:33 (#1PQCJ)

I was thinking ttat didn't seem like that much.

Years ago, when the Battlestar Galactica pilot screened on New Zealand TV, we were getting two or three minute ad breaks every few minutes. At one point, we had a single scene - consisting of two or three camera shots - bracketed by three minute ad breaks. The ship was hit by nukes? AD BREAK!

That was the point I gave up watching live TV.

Re: Entirely typical... (Score: 1)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2016-08-08 17:13 (#1PW4E)

Tried to watch some of the gymnastics this weekend. The station spent over 80% of the time watching the athletes walk around, show their backstory, wait for their turn, view their reactions to the score, etc... Everything but showing the actual competitive event. Often, so much time would pass of showing nothing, that 2-3 commercial breaks would happen before seeing the next gymnastic routine.

Plus, you pretty much only get to see the U.S. team and almost never see any of the other countries competitors.

subtitles (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2016-08-06 13:10 (#1PP40)

The thing that bugged me most about NBC's coverage of the opening ceremonies was the almost complete lack of translation of Portuguese used as part of the ceremony. NBC could have provided subtitles for the songs and announcements or at the very least had one of the announcers give some kind of summary translation but we got nothing. My friends and I just sat there listening to music without any understanding of the underlying lyrics or meaning. It seems the music would be chosen partially because of the message it delivers but if the message is not translated then it never gets delivered and thus an element of the ceremonies falls short of the desired outcome. Now knowing the broadcast was delayed makes it even more frustrating because they could have easily gotten the subtitles done during the delay.