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Australian commentators are way worse than Americans. Everything is about how great we are. I love learning about other countries and the stories of other athletes not seeing interviews with some swimmers first kindy teacher and an interview with their dog
I thought NBC/USA/E/Two other dedicated 24-hour channels/Peacock did a rather fantastic job. What more can you ask for than access to anything you want to see?
I ask for Peacock to have a place to find replays by sport. I could only find everything sorted by day or just a random order. Trying to find the men’s group gymnastics a couple of days after the event was just awful.
Korea didn’t air like… anything Koreans weren’t expected to do well in, and especially if there weren’t any Koreans. I ended up VPNing to the USA to use my parents Peacock account
How did they cover archery?
CCTV: mostly free, ads are acceptable. Decent commentaries for popular events. Peacock: paywalled, too much ads and intrusive. Commentaries are great.
Not technically my country, but the olympics were on while I was on a european holiday. Uk coverage was great, lots of different channels for watching everything Switzerland was okay, sometimes had 2x sports up at the same time which was pretty good. Italy wasnt great, couldnt find many channels (cheap TV in my airbnb might be the problem) i think i saw they had one channel dedicated to just soccer?
Free to watch, a few very short commercial breaks (like 1-2 ads during downtime, eg during synch diving after every round of dives), 5 channels, the 3 covering all day, the 2 specific times specific events. Commentators depending on sport and time were from somehow good to acceptable bad. Edit: Greece.
France : coverage of Japan Olympics was better.
This year you had to pay to get access of all stream, while last olympics everything was available for free. Kind of a bummer.
In the US. The daytime live coverage was fine, and once I figured out how to watch replays through my Spectrum (cable provider) account, I was golden.
I was far more annoyed with Primetime, which kept saying there would be limited interruptions, but then they’d manage to drag out what should have been a ten minute coverage to 30 minutes.
It could have been better, but I don’t expect much from NBC when it comes to the Olympics anymore.
On the “free” channels that you didn’t have to pay to see special sports… Too much of the sports they expected medals in. For my country’s part an overdose of handball. Otherwise not special competent on france. During the opening ceremony sounded like “question marks” when “non-american acts” was on… Would probably be better in LA.
My favourite was the Canadian broadcasters fangirling over PhilWizard
I wasn’t happy with it. It’s night after night in prime time of nothing but swimming and running competitions. I think Americans would be more interested in the team sports, like basketball, soccer, volleyball, and what the heck happened to baseball this year? I went to NBC’s olympic website hoping to find replays of the games I wanted to watch, only to find they had only highlights of the games, and not the full games. Very disappointed in what they chose to show in prime time.
CBC Gem was generally good, I wish they had streams of every sport though, like how NBC/Peacock in the US do (& I think Europe and Australia too?). Especially noticeable and annoying in the non-medal rounds for tennis where there was only 1 stream, often with a blank court while others like Nadal, Djokovic, etc. were playing.
For other sports, sometimes a trick to watching was using the French Radio-Canada stream as they often had more streams than the English CBC Gem. I did this a lot for the track and field where Radio-Canada had dedicated field event streams.
In terms of the broadcast version of CBC, Scott Russell is always amazing and it’s too bad this is his last Olympics hosting. The other hosts don’t leave me too optimistic for future broadcasts. I have no idea why they went with a four-host primetime panel show (with the same people that did an awful job commentating the Opening Ceremony, Perdita especially). From my limited time watching them before permanently changing over to NBC, it felt like watching The View. Really bizarre that for the first time, I thought NBC’s primetime coverage was better than CBC’s.
Sorry, but Donovan Bailey although a great athlete and very knowledgeable is not a good commentator.
Kenya: available on the public broadcaster but only on TV not on digital platforms. Crazy hype and discussion all round media houses
The favoritism and constant jerking off of Team USA (even when no Americans were competing!) got reaallllllyyyyy old. I wish that americans could realize the world isn’t about us. But i should consider myself lucky i was able to watch it at all, i know a lot of people don’t have access to it like i did