# Streaming Beijing Olympics on Peacock



## B. Shoe (Apr 3, 2008)

As some preliminary events are being held before the Opening Ceremonies at Beijing, I took a moment this evening to check out things under the Peacock app. While we're working under a small sample size until more events get going, this app appears to deliver a much better experience for the Winter Olympics, in comparison to the recent Summer games.

Heading under the Olympics tab, it's much easier to sort through individual events and find available content. Peacock says you can watch every event live from start to finish.

I think this will be a much better go-round than what we got from Peacock in Tokyo.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Bear in mind that there are 46 sports in the Summer Games and only 15 in the Winter Games.


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

Still Better organized.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

inkahauts said:


> Still Better organized.


But by no means a reasonable comparison.


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

Yes actually it is. One was complete unorganized disaster. It didn’t and wouldn’t have mattered if it was one sport or 1000. The other is organized. Had they simply used this format with the summer games it would have been great. Don’t confuse the disorganization as being caused simply by having more sports. The number of sports had nothing to do with it.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

inkahauts said:


> It didn’t and wouldn’t have mattered if it was one sport or 1000.


Scale almost always matters.

Covering 11,483 athletes is different from covering 3,000. There are almost twice as many US athletes in the Summer Games than in the Winter Games (613 vs 341). The number of venues (33 versus 12) and disciplines surely contribute. In both cases, this coverage is over roughly the same time span. This means a lot less jumping around to avoid missing anything (or anyone) in the Winter Games. NBC produced around 7,000 hours of coverage in 2021 and expects to produce around 2,800 in this go-around. Scale must be a significant factor.

The remark the announcers made during the opening ceremonies about how 1,000 of the crew associated with the Winter Games were located in Connecticut tells a pretty important story about how "compact" the coverage is in China and perhaps how NBC has addressed the issue.

NBC's big arrow in the 2022 quiver is the wider availability and more effective use of Peacock to stream stuff that would otherwise need to be carefully folded in to the linear coverage. In 2021, Peacock was still limited (mostly or entirely) to Comcast and Cox subscribers.

NBC has made important changes but the much lighter workload certainly had a big impact.


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## B. Shoe (Apr 3, 2008)

harsh said:


> Bear in mind that there are 46 sports in the Summer Games and only 15 in the Winter Games.


The number of sports impacted watching the Summer Games from a linear standpoint. But watching the Summer Games on the NBC Sports App was a much easier experience than Peacock. Open the app, see what events are live, and what are coming up in chronological order. If I need to sort by sport, easy. This is the biggest change that has happened to Peacock; the streaming format mirrors the NBC Sports App format.

This obviously looks cleaner in the Winter Games format because there are less events happening at any one time. But this is still a much easier experience than the oddities of live channels with no actual live competition coverage, etc., that happened during the Tokyo games.


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## B. Shoe (Apr 3, 2008)

Just an update as we're in the full swing of the games:

No Peacock bug appears on content that is streaming-only. Bugs appear for the mirror streams of the network broadcasts from NBC/USA/CNBC.
Load times and picture quality of the streams are more than acceptable, in my viewing opinion.
As we experienced with the Tokyo Olympics, the commercial system for the streaming-only coverage is haphazard and a touch annoying. You can be in the middle of a snowboarding run, etc., and a 30-second spot pops in. No notice, no bumps, just an ad spot that fires in. Commentators don't even know it's happening, as most of the streaming-only content is a world feed crew. During the times I've watched, it hasn't happened during anything I would consider a "crucial moment." But hopefully there's a way in the future that this can be a little cleaner.


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## NashGuy (Jan 30, 2014)

B. Shoe said:


> Load times and picture quality of the streams are more than acceptable, in my viewing opinion.


As per usual, picture quality is better on Peacock than via my local NBC station received OTA.


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## B. Shoe (Apr 3, 2008)

NashGuy said:


> As per usual, picture quality is better on Peacock than via my local NBC station received OTA.


Shh, don't say that too loud! You'll rattle the natives; I've heard they'll slice out your tongue on some parts of these boards for speaking such blasphemy. 🤓


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## inkahauts (Nov 13, 2006)

harsh said:


> Scale almost always matters.
> 
> Covering 11,483 athletes is different from covering 3,000. There are almost twice as many US athletes in the Summer Games than in the Winter Games (613 vs 341). The number of venues (33 versus 12) and disciplines surely contribute. In both cases, this coverage is over roughly the same time span. This means a lot less jumping around to avoid missing anything (or anyone) in the Winter Games. NBC produced around 7,000 hours of coverage in 2021 and expects to produce around 2,800 in this go-around. Scale must be a significant factor.
> 
> ...


No, scale is not why this is better. They have organized it better so it will scale better. Had they used this in the summer it would have been much better. 

You can’t use scale as the reason it sucked in the summer. It was disorganized. I well organized system will scale well up and down. I expect 2024 summer will be just like these winter games in terms of easy to find by comparison to last summers.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

We'll see.


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## thanhthungrac (11 mo ago)

We'll see


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