NBC is kicking off its Winter Olympics coverage with the "worst hand imaginable"

The New York Times

"Last year, NBC Sports executives called the Tokyo Olympics their most challenging undertaking ever," says John Koblin. "Now that experience is starting to look like a cakewalk. For this month's Winter Games in Beijing, NBC confronts an even trickier mix of challenges, threatening to diminish one of the network’s signature products and one of the last major draws to broadcast television. The list of headaches is long: an event nearly free of spectators, draining excitement from the arena and ski slopes; the threat of star athletes testing positive for Covid, potentially dashing their Olympic dreams; and the vast majority of its announcers, including Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski, offering color commentary from a network compound in Stamford, Conn., instead of China. The rising political tensions between the United States and China, including over China’s human rights abuses, add a troubling cloud to a typically feel-good spectacle." As former NBC Olympics host Bob Costas put it: "My friends and colleagues at NBC have been dealt the worst hand imaginable."

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• Why Peacock's Winter Olympics coverage should be better than its disastrous Summer Olympics: "For Peacock, last summer’s Olympics were supposed to offer a chance to hit the reset button following a rocky, pandemic-marred launch," says Josef Adalian. "Instead, the Games turned into a massive headache: Not every big event could be seen live on the platform, and finding the ones that were was a chore for even the most tech-savvy consumer. At times, it seemed as if complaining about Peacock was more popular than anything going on in Tokyo. Unsurprisingly, the NBCUniversal streamer is hoping things go more smoothly with this month’s winter games in China — and on at least one front, there is reason to think they will. The case for optimism is bolstered by one big difference from last year: Peacock is promising every minute of every Olympic event covered by NBC Sports will also be streamed live on its platform and available for later on-demand viewing. Unlike last year, you won’t need to be a cable-TV subscriber in order to watch select sports live, nor will you need to download and sign in to the separate NBC Olympics app. As long as you fork over the $5 needed for a one-month subscription to Peacock Premium, you should be good to go." Peacock president Kelly Campbell promises that Olympic programming will available to everybody for the first time, whether you're a cable subscriber or a cord-cutter. Adalian adds: While nobody at NBCU is publicly offering a mea culpa for last summer’s nonsense, comments from Campbell and other execs have made it clear they got the message. In addition to making sure subscribers will no longer need to jump between platforms to get their Olympics content, the streamer has been working to address the other big complaint from 2021: namely, that it was often difficult to figure out how to stream specific events (or when they’d be available) and that the overall user experience was needlessly complicated. To fix things, Campbell said, the streamer 'focused our efforts on three key areas: simplicity, choice, and control.'"
• NBC says having the Winter Olympics so soon after the Summer Olympics gives it a chance to really address problems: “The upside of getting to do an Olympics a couple of months after another is that you immediately get to really listen to the viewer feedback and our own critique of ourselves and our presentation, and we really focused on making the thousands of hours we produce more intuitive and findable,” says Molly Solomon, president and executive producer of NBC Olympics Production.
• How to watch every televised event at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games