I have had the pleasure of watching plenty of the BBC's coverage of this year's games. Due to being off work recovering from a hand operation. The picture quality, over all of the events has been amazing. Possibly due to advances in technology. But I feel that there has been far too much talk from far too many "experts" who have banqueted on the licence fee we all pay. Opinions ?
I've said the same a few times in various threads. Way too much punditry. It's not just the Olympics though, the BBC seems to think it's what people want, sport is secondary to talking about sport.
I watch it on my computer, so I have both the red button and the main channel coverage on at the same time, and mute the one I'm not interested in, often that's when they're just chatting. However, I do like some of the expert analysis. Currently listening to Michael Johnson who I think is excellent, also like Denise and Jess, and had the pleasure of Chris Hoy during the cycling.
It is basically a BBC jolly, same as Wimbledon. Certain sports benefit from the experts, but if I never hear from Clare Balding again it's too soon.
It’s not through choice. The BBC can only show two sports live at a time which leads to more punditry. In previous years they had all the rights & could show everything live & what wasn’t covered on the main channel was on the red button. Unfortunately Discovery have the majority of the rights now.
While its good that the Beeb don't pee about with adverts every 5 minutes, like Itv do. They do use a lot of punditry to fill the time, and constantly advertising their tv shows on I-player is so annoying!.
Shocking coverage at times. Was watching the long jump final on red button whilst cycling was on. They cut it short on the red button as he was going to be covered on BBC 1. I turned over and Gabby Logan was talking for about 15 minutes and didn’t cover any long jump until the third attempts for the favourites. Was a joke. Been deflated a few times to be honest. Many events haven’t been covered on red button or iplayer, unlike previous years. And unpopular opinion maybe, Team GB have been underwhelming this year. I don’t expect us to compete with America and China at certain events but countries like South Korea and Japan are turning up now and I could have sworn we were closer to Australia in the past. France have been good due to home advantage and them having the best swimmer in the world.
They haven't got the rights to show everything. The rights were sold to Discovery. BBC can only show 2 channels and there are multiple sports, and multiple events within those sports, running concurrently. It's impossible for them to cover everything properly, they have to prioritise.
Ahh fair play, I didn’t realised Discovery had rights! No excuse for prioritising punditry over live action though.
I agree it can be frustrating, but they have to cater for the main audience which is people sitting down after tea and wanting to catch up on the day. The real problem is that national broadcasters, like the BBC, can no longer show everything. We had a couple of Olympic games with that until the Olympic committee realised they could make a hell of a lot more money if they sold the rights to a single provider.
I think the presenters have been really good a d I've enjoyed the coverage. Thought Rebecca for swimming and Laura for cycling were lovely and I live the enthusiasm of the skateboard guys.
I'm not sure about unpopular but equally I'm not sure it's fair....so far we're only 14 medals short of the London 2012 total and should end up with our 4th highest haul since the Olympics began. We've 6 more medals than Australia, who have sent a team 25% larger than ours, 2 behind France..who have the home games boost and 250 more competitors than us, and we're in front of every other European country....despite having a smaller contingent than Spain, Italy & Germany.
