We’re stuck with NBC

In the run up to the Olympics I kept hearing how horrible it was that the Chinese government censored internet usage and people in China couldn’t just go out on the internet and get their news from whatever source they wanted. I heard more than one story about how the Chinese government was making exceptions for foreign reporters sent to cover the Olympics. Much ado was made out how awful censorship is.

Thus far Dawn and I have not been particularly thrilled with NBC Olympic coverage. Well that’s not entirely true… The coverage of the actual events, the few that I bothered to watch, seemed to be fine. I could moan and groan that all swimming events looks the same and wouldn’t it be nice to swap one or two of those out for some fencing or judo…but what would be the point. The summer Olympics are about running, swimming, volleyball and gymnastics and it doesn’t matter what I like. Fair enough. However, the color commentary offered by NBC has been pretty awful at times. (You can reference Dawn’s blog for examples.) I thought to myself that the Olympics might be more pleasant if we could get rid of the asinine NBC anchors and replace them with someone else, anyone else. So I tried to pull up BBC Olympic coverage over the internet. I quickly learned two things.

Thing 1:
You can’t pull up BBC Olympic coverage over the internet unless you live in the UK. My short and half-assed research attempt to figure out why seems to indicate that news outlets had to promise to just provide content to people in their region so as to not step on the toes of other regions who have bought the rights to broadcast the Olympics. Evidently government censorship of news is very very bad thing, but corporate censorship by the news is a good and necessary thing. Essentially we are a captive audience for our corporate news overlords and must accept whatever coverage they deem appropriate. We shall not venture to find other (less dumb) sourced of coverage.

Thing 2:
BBC Olympic coverage looks way cooler than ours. They have an animated monkey. An animated monkey. We have nary an animated simian. The one video you can watch (from outside the UK) on the BBC sports site is the commercial for BBC Olympic coverage which is in fact a two minutes animated cartoon set to music, appropriately, by the Gorillaz. How cool is that.