Topic sports

Olympics viewers overloaded with commercials during NBC Olympic Opening Ceremony

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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.

Goal-line technology new at the 2014 World Cup

by
in sports on (#3NH)
story imageThe 2014 World Cup kicks off in Brazil on Thursday. For the first time ever, goal-line technology has been installed across all twelve stadiums that will host the different world cup games. Three months before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, FIFA head, Sepp Blatter, dismissed the role for goal line technology in international competition, only to change his mind after several errors were made by the human referees . It will be interesting to see how this works out now that it has been introduced. Apparently, seven cameras are trained on each goal to determine when the ball crosses the line, each system had to correctly determine 2400 test cases to be considered ready to go, and the algorithm has the required capacity to notify the head referee within one second after a given incident via wireless communication to their wrist watch. Cool technology really.

And, whatever you think about FIFA and the World Cup, check out this recent commentary from Jon Oliver to deepen your appreciation and have a laugh/cry while you're at it.
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