Oh NBC, You Have Failed Me Once Again

This is my usual disclaimer that this review was cross posted to both my blogs on Streme of Meme as well as Really Random Reviews.  Yes, I'm that cheap when it comes to blog entries.

Oh NBC, you have failed me.

I know it's day "-2" of the Olympics, but your first soccer broadcast of the match between Germany and Brazil is about as useful as a slide show.

Late Monday night, I had a notification from my TiVo that I had magically been granted access to the NBC Olympic Soccer Channel.  This would give me access to "whistle to whistle" action of every soccer match of the Olympics.

Being the devoted soccer geek that I am, I got up this morning at 4:00 AM to watch the coverage.  I was greeted with a jerky, pixelated mess that was pretty much useless.  Even the audio wasn't coming through.  After about twenty minutes of hope that the problem would be fixed, I just grabbed my laptop and started reading RSS feeds.

Shame on NBC for promising to deliver something and then failing miserably.  A lot of people might point out that this is the first televised event, but they had FOUR YEARS to work on this.  I have never been satisfied with NBC's Olympic coverage.  They paid almost a billion dollars for the rites to the Olympics, and they have never managed to get their coverage quite right.

General Electric (which owns NBC) is very much the Six Sigma poster child.  You would think that the core focus of the televised event would be to manage down the defects in the actual broadcast to at least a five sigma level.  (For those of you that know what I'm talking about, please reward yourself with a latte and a lobotomy today).

I'll be looking forward to the day when NBC's dominance of the Olympics is over.  It's time for some fresh blood.