NBC's Olympics Coverage: Terrific, If You Can Endure All the Ads

I watched an hour of NBC's Vancouver Winter Olympics coverage on KING 5 this afternoon, and I saw about 90 seconds of actual sports action. I'm not exaggerating. I'm actually being generous.

What I did see was amazing. In covering the normal hill ski jumping from Whistler, NBC showed close-ups of every liftoff, then showed a tense and entertaining series of angles as the jumper flew to the bottom of the hill.

After the jump, analyst Jeff Hastings narrated slo-mo closeups of each take-off, providing smart and insightful commentary on each. We got reaction shots of every jumper, as well as of his coach. And, most interesting to me, a close up of the coach who signals the jumper to start--very tense coaches, these, as they are trying to choose the exact time within a seconds-long window when the wind will be the most propitious. See for yourself: Here's their coverage of Swissman (?) Simon Ammann's gold-medal-winning jump.

Great stuff. But there was so little of it. NBC would show two jumps, then pause for a long commercial break. The jumps themselves are about ten seconds long, with surrounding chatter lasting about a minute for each. So for every four minutes of coverage, with only about 20 seconds of action, I'd see three minutes of ads.

The ski jumping lasted about 30 minutes, in which I saw about nine actual jumps. They did show the last four or so without a break, which was nice.

Once Ammann finished off the competition, Al Michaels let us know that speed skating would be next. Awesome! Can't wait! Too bad, because I'd have to.

First, a commercial break. Then we got an update on how luge qualifying was going. Then, another commercial break.

Back: Speed skating time? Nope, a long piece by NBC sports reporter Mary Carillo, who traveled to The Netherlands to give us a sense of the Dutch passion for speed skating. A neat piece, really, and I wouldn't mind it sprinkled into some actual coverage of actual speed skating. Hadn't seen any yet. And it was time for another commercial break.

When the commercials are over, we're at the actual speed skating venue! (Richmond Olympic Oval, about ten miles south of Vancouver proper). Finally! The NBC speed skating announcers give us a little preview of the event, showing the top US contenders and then...we get another commercial break.

By the time they come back from this commercial break, it's been 30 minutes since the ski jumping ended, and I have to be somewhere. No speed skating for me, although I would've loved to see what NBC did with it. (Although, by this time, I already knew who won, NBC delays the coverage three hours and I'd accidentally spotted the winner on ESPN's crawl.)

I love what NBC is doing coverage-wise, and I understand why they have so many ads. Nice production costs money; they probably budgeted out what they were going to spend long before the advertising market went to hell. Plus they paid $2.2 billion to for rights to these and the 2012 Games; and this was back in 2003 when advertisers paid a lot more for network TV ads. So NBC has to run so many ads to make up what they've spent. I get it.

So I'm going to watch NBC's coverage, but I think, for the first time ever when watching live sports on TV, I'm going to make sure I have a book nearby when I do.