Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Might I tell you how much better watching the Olympics is in Canada?

In the course of reading the outrage at NBC in the United States , I was reminded how happy I am that I now live in Canada. In 2008, CBC/Radio-Canada broadcast the Olympics and it was quite an improvement over the NBC coverage I was used to. They showed everything they could live, but were unfortunately basically limited to 5 channels (CBC, Bold, and TSN in English; Radio-Canada and RDS in French). In addition, they had live web streaming of almost every event.

The Vancouver Olympics are even better. Technically, they are broadcast by "Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium." As a result, the 2010 Winter Olympics (which has fewer events) is being shown on a whopping 7 channels (CTV, TSN, Rogers SportsNet, and OLN in English; V, RDS, and RIS in French). Events are generally shown live with highlights from earlier in the day and they even provide an extremly useful viewer guide on their website. They also offer live streaming on ctvolympics.ca, but with so many channel choices, I haven't even bothered to tune in. I should add that there are even more channels available in other languages.

One other pleasant note about Canadian Olympics coverage: the announcers have a tendency to be silent and let the sports speak for themselves from time to time. It is a very nice change from the inane banter I had become accustomed to on NBC.