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You can watch any event you want with NBC too. And you were able to do so at the 2010 Olympics (Canadian CBC did it too). And you were even able to do it at the Olympics on NBC!

http://www.nbcolympics.com/online-listings/day=august-1/index.html

So yeah, coverage has been this vast and all encompassing before. Glad to hear you finally came to the party. I guess you just didn't notice NBC in the room when you got here.

This idea began in the US 20 years ago with the (failed) Olympics Triplecast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympics_Triplecast

They switched to the internet as soon as it made sense and it's been better and better every 2 years since.

NBC seems to be pretty sure they broadcast the "Olympics", the "Olympic Games", or the "Games of the nth Olympiad". Which is the same thing by slightly different names, and not the Olympiad. But please do enlighten us.

NBC Olympics' videos did. I recall it gave out a v1.0 beta version. :(

http://nbcolympics.com/ , which uses Silverlight for its videos, is still running as well.

And there are some very cool Silverlight Deep Zoom sites like http://www.deepzoomobama.com/ , that Flash has no answer for at all.

Seriously, with the Olympics barely over, haven't you people learned anything yet? nbcolympics.com used Silverlight, too. Linux doesn't work. Unless you have XP or Vista running under VMware. Then, it will work. Just make sure you've got enough RAM on your system -- and if you're going to virtualize, run XP. If you're trying to run Vista that way, you probably ought to just be shot up front so as to put you out of your misery,... ;-)

Why is gymnastics more mentally challenging than, say, swimming? Or any other sport where there isn't an age restriction?

And physically... 2 years ago, 14 year-olds were training extremely hard for this Olympics. And today, 12 year olds are training extremely hard for the next Olympics. And hell, right now, this very day, some pushy parent is making their 4 year old practice for 6 hours a day so they can win gold in 12 years.

I've seen a fair amount in the scored events, and the consistency if judging seems to be a crap shoot. How does someone fall off of a balance beam still score better than someone who stayed on the beam?

I think to anyone who watched the events, China's gold is definitely tainted.

NBC (US TV network) explained the tie-breaking process on TV that night. Judging on the technical (the B score) comes from 6 judges. They drop the highest and lowest score. The average of that is the technical and is added to the start values(the A score). If there is a tie, they compare start values. If there is still a tie, they then drop the next highest score of the technical on both athletes and get the new average. I disagree with this method in that, if I wanted a tie breaker, I would drop the next lowest and highest and not just the lowest. Mind you, this comes from courses in statistics and is not just something I'm pulling our of thin air.

As to the judging itself, I have a dislike for anything being in the Olympics that requires a human to be subjective and Team sports. So I'm automatically slightly biased against Gymnastics to being with. That said, one of the comments I heard was the disparity between the Australian (I believe) judge in that who gave the Liukin Nastia about 0.3 less than Kexin He. No other judge game Liukin Nastia less than 0.1 below their score for Kexin He. Here is hte link for the judging scores Note that B1, whose country is not listed, is supposed to be the Australian judge. Tie breaking methodology - Probably biased, but it gives the tie breaking method in full.

When have you seen a 24 year old female gymnast, much less a 40 year old one?

This year, maybe? Oksana Chusovitina took silver in Vault.

The website said that it was Vista only, on the main page when I checked

Really? Which web site? This is the page you go to if you click for more Silverlight information in the install dialog: http://www.nbcolympics.com/silverlight/index.html

It clearly lists out XP and Mac OS X.

There's actually a ton of stuff archived for those sports. You just have to drill down to each sport's "all videos" page.

297 Swimming videos: http://www.nbcolympics.com/swimming/video/all/index.html
124 Beach Vollyball videos: http://www.nbcolympics.com/beachvolleyball/video/all/index.html
380 Gymnastic videos: http://www.nbcolympics.com/gymnastics/video/index.html

Note that the Highlights and Encore clips are at a higher bitrate (up to 1.5 Mbps) than the Live and Live Rewind clips (up to 650 Kbps).

Alex Zambelli's blog has a bunch of details http://alexzambelli.com/blog/

There's actually a ton of stuff archived for those sports. You just have to drill down to each sport's "all videos" page.

297 Swimming videos: http://www.nbcolympics.com/swimming/video/all/index.html
124 Beach Vollyball videos: http://www.nbcolympics.com/beachvolleyball/video/all/index.html
380 Gymnastic videos: http://www.nbcolympics.com/gymnastics/video/index.html

Note that the Highlights and Encore clips are at a higher bitrate (up to 1.5 Mbps) than the Live and Live Rewind clips (up to 650 Kbps).

Alex Zambelli's blog has a bunch of details http://alexzambelli.com/blog/

There's actually a ton of stuff archived for those sports. You just have to drill down to each sport's "all videos" page.

297 Swimming videos: http://www.nbcolympics.com/swimming/video/all/index.html
124 Beach Vollyball videos: http://www.nbcolympics.com/beachvolleyball/video/all/index.html
380 Gymnastic videos: http://www.nbcolympics.com/gymnastics/video/index.html

Note that the Highlights and Encore clips are at a higher bitrate (up to 1.5 Mbps) than the Live and Live Rewind clips (up to 650 Kbps).

Alex Zambelli's blog has a bunch of details http://alexzambelli.com/blog/

don't worry, you can still watch the highlights or if you're in the USA they're here OT: Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?

Let's just do this the right way: Rank by athelete.

#1 - Michael Phelps

#2 - Who cares...

To download video requires Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate required because it uses Windows Media Center. To watch video requires Silverlight... which requires Windows.

OT: Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?

The obvious answer is to keep the U.S.A. on top. And no doubt, China's medal distribution is more impressive than the U.S.A.

But a less biased answer might be to avoid putting a country like Belarus with 10 medals but no gold medals after 4 countries with only one medal each, that happen to be gold.

IMO, winning 3 silver and 7 bronze is more impressive than one gold.

OT: Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?

Maybe because that is the only form of ranking that places the US above China...

OT: Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?

because that puts them top? trust me, if the yanks had won the most golds, they'd rank the table the same as everyone else

don't worry, you can still watch the highlights or if you're in the USA they're here

OT: Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?

No normal person can even hope to compete with people who live to train.

But they aren't "freaks" — Phelps, for example, is a perfectly normal 23-year old. The beach volleyball babes are quite attractive, and so on. They are normal, and the "living to train" is a choice a person can make — without also choosing to chemically alter their body.

using firefox on a mac here, and i was able to use the player at http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/index.html fine after installing silverlight...

From the article:

NBC has contracted with Quantcast Corp. to get a sense of who is using NBCOlympics.com.

In that case, all the Linux and Mac users being blocked by Microsoft's dodgy deal with NBC should head over to http://www.nbcolympics.com/ and make sure they know the decision to block us was a bad one. Bonus points for leaving the site, and never returning, when you hit a lame 'platform not supported' message (I hit one in the Video section).

Of course, the playlist comes from Doubleclick.net, and yes, the stream itself is coming from Akamai, in my case, a906.v193758.c19375.g.vm.akamaistream.net.

As a note, this post is time-sensitive, as obviously the live stream won't be around once the game is over.

The deck is not stacked in the US favor because there are NHL players on practically EVERY TEAM in the Olympics why don't you head on over to http://www.nbcolympics.com/ and look up the hockey section and see for yourselves, or better yet, take your hands out of your pants, find the remote and change the channel from G4 to NBC for a bit. If you ignorant fools are going to spew your self righteousness, you might want to bone up on your facts before posting

At 13, the entrepreneur founded an online marketing company that he says has grown to the third-largest in the world. Begg-Smith originally started the Vancouver and New York-based company, which designs search engines and pop-up window blockers for about 5,000 websites, to fund his ski career.

Forget divers and sprinters...
Kerri Walsh in slow mo baby... ahhh yeah...

-G

I'm pissed at how little of the Olympics will be broadcast. The network covering this years events has like 7 cable channels which means they have potentially 1,200+ hours per week to cover the events yet they will only have that many hours of coverage over three weeks, and much of that dedicated to the "major" events.

What's worse is that the stupid licensing agreements make it impossible for them to webcast niche events to those who would pay for them because then some channel in zimbabwe that wasn't going to broadcast the event anyways isn't getting their money's worth =( Oh yeah and the events are hard to keep up on because the participants are bared from reporting on their OWN participation on a weblog or similar self publication.

I'd love to watch the biathalon. Cross country skiing alternated with crack rifle shooting. Ever try to shoot a tiny target while your heart is racing a mile a minute? It's not as easy as it sounds. Unfortunately, I have yet to see more than a thirty-second clip of the sport in the last few Olympics.

It is really sad that the IOC couldn't hire an independant site builder to create the site here.

The bit about "IBM ... landed the gig for producing Olympics.com, a job that ordinarily in the sports world goes to an online media outfit" is (IMHO) totally wrong. IBM produces and hosts some of the biggest sporting-events sites out there, including www.wimbledon.org, www.usopen.org (tennis, not golf), www.pga.com, www.ausopen.org, www.rydercup.org, etc. In addition they hosted the official sites for the Atlanta and Nagano games. This comment ignores IBM's track record in hosting these sporting event sites during the events. (FWIW, this is the last Olympics that IBM will be hosting...)

Quokka's a company that was largely built on the promise of the 2000 games on the web.

NBC is a major partner, and they teamed up to make NBC Olympics site. Realtime stats and progress of sporting events is what Quokka's all about. Are they supposed to abandon the games? Doesn't NBC's agreement cover this?

If not, they got royally rooked because they've poured millions and millions into a web presence and information dissemination point for the games, and paid the IOC a huge sum for the exclusive rights.

Kevin Fox