LinLog

It's finally time for the Olympics!  Hooray!

I was very disappointed that the Olympic games were postponed last year.  I'm not too big on watching sports, but the Olympics is the one event that I always look forward to.  And now that the pandemic has receded (at least to some extent), the games are on again.

The one problem with the Olympics is how to watch it.  The problem is that the NBC network has the exclusive rights to show the Olympics in the US.  So yea, I mean, it's on TV, but who watches regular old TV anymore?  I don't want to have to sit in front of the television and listen to commercials every 15 minutes.  And I don't want to have to watch at particular times (and I'm not about to set up a DVR just for one week).  As I recall from the last games, you could watch online, but you had to have a cable subscription.  I cut the cord years ago, and I'm certainly not going to call Spectrum to sign up and then spend an hour on hold trying to cancel the next week.

This year, though, things are better.  NBC now has a streaming service, PeacockTV, and it shows the Olympics!  I signed up for it this week and it's not too bad.  You do have to create an account, but it offers a free tier that includes some Olympic coverage.  I actually signed up for the premium tier because that gets you all of the events and there are "limited" ads.

I have yet to catch up on the opening ceremonies, but I did watch a few of the softball games.  So far, my only complaint is the "limited ads".  Maybe it'll be different for the top-tier events, but for the softball games, it turns out that "limited ads" appears to mean that they just take the normal TV footage and put a slide saying "the event will resume soon" where the ads would go.  But they don't actually cut out the commercial time, they just leave that slide up for two minutes.  And sometimes, they don't cut it correctly and you see the first or last 5 seconds of a Geico ad or something.  It's really kinda cheesy and bush-league.  You'd expect at least an attempt at professional editing from an organization like NBC, so it's clear that this feature is  very much an after-thought.

But regardless of shortcomings, it's nice to have a good, affordable streaming option available for the Olympics.  And it's even better to have one that does replays rather than requiring you to watch live.  So if you like watching the games and don't want to be tied to the prime-time TV schedule, I definitely recommend giving PeacockTV a look.