Olympic Fever

I LOVE the Olympics. Sure, I HATE how NBC covers it in prime time (more about avoiding that in a minute) and I don't care for gymnastics, which seems to dominate the coverage. But I do enjoy watching some sports on an every four years basis, like swimming and track, and the drama is tough to beat.

Watching the Olympics is THE reason to have a DVR. NBC paid a ton a dough for the rights and they can't make that back in advertising if they are only appealing to sports fans. So, they do everything they can to keep the non-sports fans watching, which means showing less competition, so they can sell more Tide.

However, since they paid a king's ransom, they want to show as much as possible, which they are doing on their other networks (e.g., MSNBC, Universal HD, USA, Oxygen, etc.) and two special channels that show only basketball and soccer. If you go to http://www.nbcolympics.com/tv_and_online_listings/index.html and enter your cable/satellite and zipcode information, you can see where these channels are (on DirecTV in LA they are channels 750-756). The coverage on the non-NBC channels have far fewer commercials and show a particular competition from start to finish. They also show some off-beat (to most Americans) sports, like badminton and fencing. With the time difference you can watch a lot of competition and, more importantly, its in the sports you want to see. Very cool. Oh, and there's other events that you can stream off of the website.

It was nice last night to see Michael Phelps cruise to a world record in the 400 IM. That dude is amazing.

In other sports news, the Angels laid into the Yankees again last night. Hopefully they'll complete the sweep today.