NBC is making sure fans of the Summer Olympic Games from Rio can watch more coverage than ever.
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NBC Olympics announced in June that it will provide virtual reality coverage of the games for the first time.
The good news is that much of it will be live, since Rio is in the British Summer Time zone, which is one hour ahead of in time. A late-night window (hosted by Ryan Seacrest) appears after the “Tonight” show from 12:35-to-1:35 a.m., and an edited replay of everything goes from 1:35 a.m.to 4:30 a.m. NBC’s 170-member broadcast team includes a stable of former athletes, including swimmer Rowdy Gaines, gymnast Tim Daggett and diver Laura Wilkinson, that has combined for 59 Olympic medals. Considering the network paid $1.2 billion for the broadcast rights to the Rio Olympics, it has already broken even on that regard.
For the U.S. TV viewer, the ceremonies will be seen an hour later – at 8 p.m. ET. The network said US viewers wouldn’t stick with the broadcast if the United States came in the stadium with the “E” group (Estados Unidos in Portuguese) rather than the “U” group (United States in English). According to network executives, all these negative stories about Zika, social unrest and sewage-infested waters, have raised awareness about the Games, and this has in turn helped to boost the network’s ad sales. It’s also a handy place for keeping track of which events you want to watch because they have a comprehensive schedule you can check out any time. NBC has the ability to show more live events on its main channel (WRAL in Raleigh) than say the previous games in Beijing or Sydney.
The West Coast will get a tape-delayed version of the East Coast telecast during the evening prime-time hours on NBC.
The Golf Channel, for example, concentrates on the Olympic return of its namesake sport.
Bravo will be the Olympic home of tennis. A specialty channel for soccer and basketball has also been offered by NBCUniversal that adds up to 779 hours, depending on how your TV providers make it available.
The team in Rio offers a wide range of skills and Olympic experience: NBC 4 New York’s Bruce Beck will be covering his seventh Olympic Games, NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth’s Brian Curtis his fifth Games and NBC 7 San Diego’s Steven Luke and NBC Connecticut’s Kevin Nathan their fourth Games, while NBC4 Southern California’s morning anchor team, Whit Johnson and Daniella Guzman, are making their Olympic debut. The basic Access package costs $40 a month and includes NBC, Bravo, CNBC, MSNBC, NBCSN, and USA. In Spanish, the Olympics are on Telemundo and NBC Universo.
The network is also going further with its coverage of this year’s Games with 2,084 hours of coverage planned across 11 networks, and 260.5 hours slated for NBC alone. But perhaps never before has coverage of the Games by the rest of the media world and NBC’s usual strategy of glossy portraits of athletes struggle seemed so at odds.
Whether any city can carry off the enormous event is the question heading into virtually every Olympics, Bell said. “I think America is ready to cheer on, not only the Americans, but everybody else, for a couple weeks to get some relief from all of that and to watch really uplifting stories”. If you use it to share photos or video during the Olympics, the flag of your choice will be overlaid on the user’s face to make it look like it’s been painted.
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