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“NBC sucks” is a constant drone you hear each and every Olympics. “They didn’t show enough of the Tajikistan entrance, ergo they are biased against Tajikstan” and other silliness often is heard on the messageboards and other sites (and no, I’m not kidding about the Tajik reference–it happens).
So now that we’re done with that, let’s talk about some real live numbers behind this year’s Olympics.
NBC is going to have 835 hours of coverage across multiple platforms (and I believe that includes online coverage as well). This is way up from the 419 hours of Torino coverage in 2006, and 375.5 hours in 2002 Salt Lake City. It will also be the first Olympics produced entirely in HD (though my local WRC coverage got messed up last night due to a glitch with Comcast that I had, so I watched most of the Opening Ceremony in Standard Definition. How 2003 was that?)
NBC is doing all this coverage with a significantly lower staff this year. 2168 employees which is down from the 2,768 they sent to Torino and 3,260 in Salt Lake. You would figure more advanced technology might require more personnel, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
But if you really want to get into the technical bits of the coverage, you need to read this amazing piece in BroadcastingCable magazine that goes into some massive details, such as What type of Cameras are they using for Vancouver?
NBCU will use more than 100 cameras, all equipped with Canon lenses, to supplement OBS’ coverage. They include Sony HDC-1400, -1500 and -3300 units, and for ENG applications, Sony’s new PDW-F800 XDCAM HD optical-disc camcorders.Um, ok. It also goes into some details about how the streams are being processed directly in Vancouver instead of backhauled to their HQ and redone there (as they had to do with the China Olympics). Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting article if you like technical details of television sports broadcasting.]]>
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You might get that idea in the media. This month I finished 
, which in Swedish was called Men who Hate Women 
. It was about some murders of women…well I won’t spoil the plot other than to say sex and murder had a pretty big role.
Last night I watched the first episode of Wallander on 
stories have been a staple of reading in Europe for the last decade, and a Swedish tv version has been around for nearly as long. The BBC took a shot at making some films and the result was pretty good, though it also dealt with the same weird sex / violent murder that seems to be particularly Swedish this month.
Wallander was pretty good. I suspect I’ll watch the next few episodes and maybe read a book or two (heck, without cable I don’t have much of a choice besides PBS). I don’t think I’ll be visiting Ikea anytime soon. Too much weird Swede stuff this month.]]> 
France 24 in the news section offer live streaming of the France 24 (think CNN of France). The buffering is pretty quick and the quality is not bad. France24 is a different take on some of the news out of Europe and this lets you watch them on your iPhone via wifi pretty easily. Free app and worth a download.
TVU is p2p video streaming company that allows you to watch tons of content from around the world, some of which is probably not authorized by the copyright holder. The app is in beta and released, but will likely have a few new developments that will make it much more useful (such as widescreen, which I haven’t figure out how to use just yet. Lots of Chinese channels (as I’ve said before, the Chinese are light years ahead of the US on IPTV — light years). Amazing what developments can be done when DRM is not the first consideration.