NBCOlympics’ Opening Ceremony Tape Delay: Stupid, Stupid, Stupid
Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More If you were paying attention to Twitter today, you were probably met with two conflicting sides of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. On the one hand, you had those who were on the ground (or who had access to the live stream somehow — more on that later), and those who were bitching about not being able to watch the ceremony live. While most of the rest of the world — or at least Europe — was watching the ceremony live, U.S. audiences were held hostage by NBC, which holds the rights to the games here. Rather than broadcasting the biggest event of the Games live as it happened, NBC decided it would air the ceremony on a tape delay, to capture a larger overall audience. Now, tape delays are nothing new, but they do seem archaic at a time when online video and soc...