I love watching the Olympics.  Every two years I get to watch athletes from around the world compete against each other to represent their countries and bring home medals and glory. 

But every two years NBC does their best to ruin the experience.  So far this year’s coverage (granted, we’re only 24 hours in, but…) is spread out over a confusing melange of channels and streaming services, and when are finally able to find coverage it’s 25% commentary, 25% event coverage, 25% commercials, and 25% highlights of events, which often spoil the conclusion of events that they are broadcasting on other channels. 

I recognize that NBC has a hard job in trying to show all these different sporting events, but they aren’t succeeding.   I would like to see them have one channel, showing the highlights (for people who don’t have time to watch), two channels showing complete coverage of the most popular sports (like track&field, football, gymnastics), and then have five or six channels where they just broadcast everything.  Not everything will be live, but they can show everything.

Or they could simply have categories in their Peacock app for each sport where you can watch every match live. They have something like this, but if I want to watch the event, I have to wait a day or two until everybody already knows the conclusion. That kind of ruins it.   Also they are only showing 11 out of the 33-ish sports. Want to watch 3×3 basketball? Too bad. It’s not there.

But instead we end up watching “Olympics SportsCenter” with tons of commercial breaks.  Hey NBC: some of us want to watch the actual Olympics. Do better, NBC.